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V 



The Batavia System 



OF 



Individual Instruction 



BY 

JOHN KENNEDY, A. M. 

AUTHOR OF The phii.osophv of school uiscipijne. The school 
AND the family, What WORDS SAY, MusT Grrek «o? etc. 



SYRACUSE, N. Y. 

C. W. BARDEEN, PUBLISHER 

1914 



Copyright, 1914. by John Kennedy 



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"For some years I have been conscious of the fact that our 
modem graded school system that strives to treat all the 
pupils in exactly the same way is resulting in worry and the 
consequent nervous strain so common in pupils and in teach- 
ers. The absence of everything of this kind from pupils and 
teachers in the Batavia schools is to me the mos't noteworthy 
result of organized individual instruction as it exists there. 
A system that will save for effective use the energy that is 
being wasted, and even worse than wasted, will increase 
many fold the efficiency of our schools. Such a system seems 
to have been evolved by Sup't Kennedy and to have passed 
beyond the experimental stage into the realm of demon- 
.strated fact in the Batavia schools." — Chas. F. Wheelock, 
Assistant commissioner of secondary education, University 
of the State of New York. 

"To-day while visiting the recitation of an old-time friend, 
Dr. Boughton, now at the Erasmus Hall high .school, I noticed 
an incident which interested and pleased me, as doubtless 
it will you. In the class discussion about Oliver Goldsmith's 
school days. Dr. Boughton asked the question 'Are there 
really any dull boys?' One little fellow, not more than 
thirteen years old, said: 

" 'There are not. This has been proved at Batavia, N. Y., 
where a system of individual instruction has been adopted 
which is attracting people from all parts of the world. This 
system shows that all children earn learn if they only have a 
chance.' • • 

"I was hardly prepared to'h'ear a school boy .speak of in- 
dividual instruction, but this incident to me is .significant. 
Dr. Gunnison, principal of the school, to whom I related 
this incident, is deeply interested in your work, and will in a 
few weeks send one or two of his teachers to study the sys- 
tem. And so the good work goes on." Sup't Albert Leonard, 
New Rochelle, N. Y., former president Michigan state normal 
schools. 



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©CI,A.'KS0966 



OCT 12 1914 



^ / 



INTRODUCTION 

In the forty years that I have been getting 
acquainted with teachers I have found a large 
proportion of those who are more than place- 
holders divided into two classes: those who 
adopt every new notion that finds advocates, 
like no-recess, ambidexterity, vertical penman- 
ship, and discard it as soon as other people 
begin to discard it; and those whose minds 
have been tickled by the epigram that what 
is new is not true and what is true is not new, and 
who refuse to admit that the unaccustomed 
may be worth investigation. The Batavia 
system has suffered from both of these classes. 
The first have nominally adopted it, without 
comprehension of its underlying and funda- 
mental features; the others have passed it by 
on the other side as an undue featuring of a 
familiar principle. It will be well for both 

(V) 



vi THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

these classes to know what the Batavia system 
is not. 

(1) It is not individual instruction. There 
was never a school that did not give individual 
instruction. The Batavia system is a system 
of individual instruction, substituting for oc- 
casional, haphazard personal teaching, often 
after hours when both teacher and pupil are 
wearied, or during recess when the teacher is 
hurried, or in course of recitation when the 
pupil is embarrassed and the class is kept wait- 
ing, a system whereby such instruction has its 
regular time and place with none of these iin- 
certainties and difficulties. 

(2) It is not a way to boost pupils. Its 
foundation principle is not to tell but to lead 
the pupil to find out for himself. Instead of 
robbing the pupil of the joy of achievement by 
seeking to find for him a -royal road to knowl- 
edge it glorifies the achievehient and the joy 
of it, and inspires a love and a habit of it. 

(3) It is not a device for helping backward 



INTRODUCTION vii 

pupilvS. It helps them, but it helps bright 
pupils too, and there is no recognition of back- 
ward pupils. Every pupil in school is benefited. 

(4) It is not a foe to the graded system. 
On the contrary, nowhere are the advantages 
and the necessity of the class more convincingly 
demonstrated than in this book. It sustains 
the graded system by supplementing it. 

(5) It is not a way to get extra labor from 
the teacher. On the contrary, it lightens her 
work and relieves her of anxiety. 

(6) It is not an excuse to add to expense. 
On the contrary it lightens it, producing more 
result at less cost. 

If all this is true, and there is a great deal 
of excellent testimony here to prove it from 
men whose word commands respect, then the 
Batavia system is worthy of investigation, 
and this book with its full index makes that 
investigation easy. 

The standard held up for pupils at Batavia 
is high. Far from the Montessori notion that 



viii THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

everything must yield to the impulses of the 
child, the pupil is taught from the first the joy 
of accomplishing what is given him to do. 
There is a modern tendency to rob children 
of this joy, to find a royal road to learning. "If 
I held all knowledge in my closed fist," the 
philosopher said, "I would open my hand and 
let it fly away for the joy of gathering it once 
more." It is not our knowledge we value in 
later years, but the process through which 
what we have of knowledge was procured. 

Can you look back to the afternoon when 
you knew it was your duty to write an essay, 
but you wanted to play ball, to get a lesson, to 
read a book, all laudable things to do except 
that on this occasion it was your duty to do 
something else? Do you remember how you 
pondered over it before you could conquer 
yourself sufficiently to set at work, how hard 
it was to get started, but how when once the 
spirit of work came upon you it took possession 
of your whole being, till you wrote almost with 



INTRODUCTION ix 

inspiration, and never rose from the table till 
it had been completed and corrected and copied, 
and you could say to yourself, "That is the best 
of which I am capable"? How many joys in 
life have you had equal to that? The joy was 
not in the product — you forgot the essay long 
ago. It was in the process, in the satisfaction 
of self-mastery, the victory of effort, the de- 
light of accomplishment. Getting this is about 
all that is worth while in education. 

It is to my mind the strongest feature of the 
Batavia system that it preserves and en- 
courages and stimulates this joy of accom- 
plishment. The child is never told by his 
teacher. He is shown how to find out for him- 
self, and to enjoy finding out for himself. The 
leisure for individual work gives the teacher 
opportunity to discover where the boy's think- 
ing machine is clogged, to remove the obstacle, 
and to set it going again. It is not the answer 
to the arithmetic problem the teacher wants: 
it is the ability and the perseverance of the boy 



X THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

to get the answer. In class she can do Httle 
more than assure herself the answers are cor- 
rect. In individual work she can make sure 
he can solve all such problems, and that he 
will joy in being able to do it. Love and work 
are the only things in life really worth while. 
Love comes to most of us but some miss it. 
Nobod}^ need miss work, and if joy in honest 
work is planted in his soul his life will not be 
barren or unhappy. 

That the Batavia children acquire this joy 
is not a theory. The principal argument for 
vocational work is that it takes hold of chil- 
dren when they have begun to be restless and 
want to give up school. The Batavia children 
do not want to give up school. They stay in 
the grades, they enter the high school, they 
finish the course, boys and girls alike, and they 
choose the cultural studies, the hard studies. 
In an enrolment of 1750 there are 850 in the 
upper seven of the twelve grades, and 375 in 
the high school. The proportion of pupils 



INTRODUCTION xi 

studying Greek is larger than in any other city 
or village of the state. 

One explanation is that under this system 
school work beconies intensive. There is none 
of the dawdling over an open book that not 
only is not study but precludes the knowledge 
of what study is. From time immemorial the 
recitation has been looked upon as a battle of 
wits between instructor and pupils to detect 
lack of preparation. A library could be made 
from familiar anecdotes, like that of the pro- 
fessor who said severely, "I have discovered 
that because I always begin at the head of the 
class and call upon you in turn, you have pre- 
pared yourselves only upon the questions that 
you reckon will fall to you. I shall put a short 
stop to that. Hereafter I shall begin at the 
other end of the class." 

I am myself a graduate of a good college to 
which I owe a great deal, but not forty of the 
two thousand recitations I attended were in 
themselves instructive. I had a liking for 



xii THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

geometry, and one day I demonstrated a prop- 
osition in Euclid by a method different from 
that in the book. The tutor asked me to go 
over it again, and seemed puzzled. Finally he 
remarked, ''That demonstration seems cor- 
rect; I will assume that it is so. But hereafter 
please give in class the demonstration that is 
in the book. Then if you will hand in to me 
after class any original demonstrations I will 
give you extra credit for them." That was 
half a century ago, but I fear there would be 
little more to learn in many college recitations 
today. If a sort of ergograph could be devised 
that would measure mechanically whether the 
boys had got their lessons the time of the recita- 
tion might be saved. 

Under the Batavia system the pupil is not 
tempted to pretend. It is no humiliation to 
say, "I do not know", which always means, 
"I want to know and am ready to be shown 
how to find out". The time of the class is not 
occupied in sparring with a bluffing pupil who 



INTRODUCTION xiii 

has made no preparation. The relation be- 
tween pupil and teacher is of frankness, candor, 
effort, helpfulness. The moral effect of this 
is shown in manliness and womanliness. 

The Batavia system requires not only work 
but honest work, fair methods, generous com- 
petition, the spirit of the hero and of the gentle- 
man. With the individual teaching systemati- 
cally provided for, these lessons can be incul- 
cated, here a little, there a little. 

What are all people most sensitive about? 
Any little reflection upon what we call good- 
breeding, the knowing what it is proper to do. 
Look back in your own life and ask yourself 
how many actual precepts of good breeding 
were ever given to you in words? Usually 
you will find there were very few, but they 
came at the right time, and each one gave you 
an insight into a score of principles with a 
multitude of applications. The school cannot 
overcome the influences of an uncultivated 
home environment, but it can mightily modify 



xlv THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

them. By here a hint and there a suggestion 
the teacher who has time to do it and interest 
to do it can turn her boys and girls toward an 
ideal and an observation and an apprehension 
and a consideration for others that will put 
upon the school as a whole the impress of good 
breeding. Which would you rather have said 
of your school, "It took the prize at the county 
spelling match", pr, "It certainly has a remark- 
ably well-mannered lot of boys and girls"? 

Nor should Mr. Kennedy's claim be forgotten 
that under this system the teachers have time 
and opportunity not only to gain entrance into 
social circles but to shine there. Why not? 
It is every year an increasing wonder to me that 
such fine young women become teachers. It 
is no exaggeration to say that a majority of our 
choicest girls enter the schoolroom, at least for 
a time: it is still the natural employment for 
the well educated young woman who does not 
want to be idle. 

But we have been wearing out our teachers. 



INTRODUCTION xv 

A woman teacher is at her zenith, so far as 
ehgibiUty is concerned, at twenty-eight, which 
means that from twenty to thirty she is over- 
worked, nervously exhausted. Her school drags 
upon her, she loses her resilience, she is worn 
out just when she should be becoming most 
useful. Incidentally the school absorbs her, and 
she has no time or taste for social functions. 

Mr. Kennedy says that is not true under 
the Batavia system. The teacher's work is 
done at three, and she has no worries over the 
day or the morrow. She can go home to dress, 
to call, to be hostess or guest, to enter into the 
spirit of all that is restful and stimulating in a 
cultivated community. If that is true, that 
alone makes the Batavia system worth looking 
into. 

It will be noticed that a good deal is said 
here of the happiness of the children as con- 
trasted with the suffering, the tragedies of the 
usual schoolroom. Are these phrases exag- 
gerated? Here is a letter that I happened to 



xvi THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

come across today, which I quote only becaus'e 
it will save my looking up a more recent one. 
It was left behind by a boy 14 years old in 
Morris, 111., who committed suicide in 1898. 

"Friends: — I shot myself because the teacher 
would not let me alone. I worked six examples 
on the board, and I asked her if they were write, 
and she said 'You may go to your seat and have 
a failure for bothering me,' and after I had went 
to my seat she had me name on the board a 
big ott (0) after it, and then they laughed at 
me. if I can't be marked for what I work I 
can go to heaven and the Lord won't cheat me 
eather. Dear mother, I love you and Clara 
and Eliza, do not weep over me, but tell Pap 
If he comes back that I said good-by to him. 
this is all I have to say I hope the Lord will 
watch over you All Good-by to all my Friends 
In love your friend 

Ray Bothalmey, City." 



■ INTRODUCTION xvH 

In the forty years that I have edited the 
School Bulletin there has been hardly a month 
when such instances have not come to my 
notice : two of them in Brooklyn I chronicled in 
the June number this year. We forget, now 
that we are grown, how real were the sorrows 
of our childhood. I was myself expelled from 
a Vermont academy by a principal who could 
have got along with me easily enough if his 
thought had been less upon his dignity and 
more upon the boy. I did not lay it up against 
him : I had given hiip considerable provocation ; 
but it was no fault of his that I did not go 
straight to the devil. Teachers get overwrought, 
nervous, touchy, irritable, till a naturally kind 
heart shows recognizable malice. My children 
have suffered in- school to my knowledge. Your 
children have suffered, whether you know it or 
not. The word is not a bit too strong. 

Now there is testimony in this book from a 
score of witnesses competent to judge that the 
Batavia system eliminates this suffering. If 



xviii THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

it does, it ought to be adopted. All these men 
and women may be mistaken, but their array 
of testimony makes it the duty of school men 
to investigate. 

A word should be said for some of these wit- 
nesses. Superintendent Ladd is competent. 
He did not originate the system and has none 
of the parental pride of the parent. He has a 
legal mind and training; before he became a 
teacher he was a practising attorney. He is 
known among the teachers of the state as a man 
of careful judgment and moderate statement. 
He is at the head of one of the committees ap- 
pointed by the Regents of the University to 
prepare examination questions for all the schools 
of the state. So the chapter that he writes 
is worth reading and pondering. We may be 
sure that what he says weighs sixteen ounces to 
the pound. Mind what it tells is not what was 
done the first year the system was tried. He 
has known it for all the sixteen years it has been 
in operation. He is speaking of permanent 
results. 



INTRODUCTION xix 

Miss Hamilton, Miss Stein, Miss Ferry are 
competent witnesses. They have taught under 
the Batavia system from the beginning, and 
they speak of what they know and of what they 
have been called upon to prove in the Univer- 
sities of Pennsylvania and of Virginia. 

Superintendent W. H. Holmes is competent; 
he has recently been called from Westerly, R. I., 
to the charge of the schools of Mount Vernon 
in this state. What he says in chapter XXX 
is said at much greater length in his published 
book, "School organization and the .individual 
child" (Worcester, 1912), a masterly treatment 
of the subject. You will find like testimony in 
Bagley's "School and class management". 

Prof. Thiselton Mark, author of the "History 
of educational theories" and editor of Charles 
Hoole's "A new discovery of the old art of 
teaching school", was sent here by the English 
government to inspect certain phases of our 
school work, and his endorsement is emphatic. 
Dr. J. A. Houston, inspector of high schools, 



XX THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

was sent to Batavia by the minister of educa- 
tion for the province of Ontario, and declares 
unequivocally for what the Batavia plan pro- 
vides. 

Stanley Holmes, Barney Whitney, Emmet 
Belknap, E. D. Palmer, J. K. Beck are city 
superintendents of Massachusetts, New York, 
Michigan, Indiana, who came to see for them- 
selves and who were convinced. In face of 
such testimony it does not become the young 
teacher to declare there is nothing new to be 
learned here. 

The variety of expression among these wit- 
nesses is a proof of their independent investiga- 
tion. Even the "three don'ts" that lie at its 
foundation are remembered by some of them 
as two, the third, not to do any thing upon a 
lesson that has not been recited, being over- 
looked. In fact it will be found interesting to 
compare their various reports through the very 
full index, and see how they differ in expression 
and in detail but agree upon the fundamental 
principles. 



INTRODUCTION xxi 

A word should be said for Mr. Kennedy's 
own style. If the reader has time for only 
one chapter let him read that upon the laggard, 
page 225. If he does not believe it at the first 
reading, let him reflect upon it and read it 
again, and he will recognize a new and sound 
view-point of untold possibilities. 

C. W. Bardeen 

Syracuse, N. Y., Aug. 12, 1914 



The Batavia System 

OP 

Individual Instruction 



6 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

XVII Testimony of a Batavia prin- 
cipal 124 

XVIII An Indiana view 126 

XIX A Wisconsin adoption 129 

XX A revelation and a revolution . . . .131 

XXI The present view in Batavia 139 

XXII Elimination of the ninth grade . . .151 

XXIII Strengthening the graded sys- 
tem 162 

XXIV With children of foreign paren- 
tage 180 

XXV Advantages over after-school 

assistance 185 

XXVI Development of the spirit of 

work 200 

XXVII Personal aid under favorable 

conditions 207 

XXVIII As seen in Canada 213 

XXIX What to do with the laggard 224 

XXX Class individual instruction 241 

XXXI Opinions of teachers 253 

XXXII A Minnesota view 258 

The blue and the white 262 

INDEX 265 



The first day the teacher went to the child's desk, but had to lean over, so thereafter 
the teacher had a chair in front and the child came to her. With this exception the plan 
has been unchanged from the first. 




The individual teacher at work in a two-teacher room 




The class teacher at work, with the individual teacher on the right. The empty 
desks belong to pupils now reciting in front. 



The Batavia System 

HISTORY AND EXPOSITION 
Chapter I 

Its Origin 

In the fall of 1898 a grade room in Batavia 
was overflowing. It contained 53 children. 
The usual procedure in a case of that kind had 
been to take out a portion of the children and 
open up a new room. 

The room referred to happened to be a large 
one. There were seats not occupied, and there 
was floor-space for other seats. So the con- 
gestion was not a physical one. 

The superintendent thought that he saw an 
opportunity for a great rescue. He had seen 
grades breaking down; and had seen children 
and teachers collapsing under the strain of 
wholesale teaching. He therefore advised the 
board to leave all the children in that room and 

(9) 



10 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

to send the new teacher in there to do indi- 
vidual work exclusively. He said: "The stand- 
ing reproach against the graded school system 
ever since it was started has been that it does 
not reach the needs of individuals; that in its 
scheme of handling masses it often over-rides 
the individual and rides him down. Let there 
be one room in the world in which that reproach 
will not hold. Let there be one room in which 
the individual is attended to. I believe that 
every child can be saved to health and success; 
and I believe that we take off all strain from a 
teacher when we take from her those who are 
dragging. I believe that the teacher now in 
that room can handle all those children and 
many more with perfect ease and success, if 
she has some one to assume the burden of the 
laggards." 

The board felt that the superintendent was 
right; and though they had no precedent for 
their action, they proceeded to make their own 
precedent, and appointed on the spot the first 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 11 

individual teacher in the history of education. 

The instructions given to that teacher were 
to go into that room, find the most backward 
children, and make them the most forward. 
She did that, of course. And for the first time 
in the history of education there was a large 
room leveled up, a large room in which there 
was no child dragging and no child retarded. 

The individual teacher did her work at a 
table, calling the child to her as she became 
ready for him, and detaining him as long as 
she deemed it expedient. She had the first 
claim on a child and might call on or detain 
him even if his class was reciting. 

To guard against any injudicious help she 
was restricted by three restraining "don'ts". 
1st, don't tell the child anything, but see that 
he knows it. 2d, don't do anything for the child 
but see that he does it. 3d, don't do any in- 
dividual work on an unrecited lesson. 

The class-teacher went on as usual conduct- 
ing classes all day long, the room being divided 



12 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

into two sections, a preparation section and a 
recitation section. No recitation was obstruct- 
ed any longer. Lack of preparation meant 
lack of participation. The ready ones parti- 
cipated; and there was no longer any marking 
of time. The children were all happy; and 
they were all successful. There were no failures 
to be accounted for. 

It was thus demonstrated that teaching is a 
dual process; and that failures are the result 
of trying to carry on education by a single pro- 
cess. 

After establishing the dual process in rooms 
that overflowed, then came the question of 
establishing it in rooms that were not overflow- 
ing. That was accomplished by having the 
single teacher give every other period to indi- 
vidual work. If she had but a single grade the 
individual period corresponded with their pre- 
paration period. If she had two grades she 
arranged for individual periods by having a 
two-day program. 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 13 

In the high school each teacher assigned five 
lessons a week, but used every other period for 
individual attention. And in addition the high 
school had an individual table at which a teach- 
er labored all day long. 



Chapter II 

Underlying Principles 

1. Schools become clogged, (a) by slow 
minds, (b) by irregular attendance, (c) by dis- 
couraged minds. 

2. The attempt to force forward an ob- 
structed school is detrimental to all concerned, 
(a) It overstrains the teacher, (b) It depresses 
the teaching, (c) It destroys the condition of 
repose and equipoise essential to good teaching, 
(d) It is wasteful of time, destructive of interest, 
and promotive of discouragement, (e) It tends 
to wholesale failure, indicated by the great 
multitudes who drop out, and by the indifferent 
scholarship of the few who persevere to the end. 

3. Statistics show that in elementary and in 
secondary schools, and throughout the first 
stages of higher education the falling out is the 
rule and that a low grade of work and scholar- 

(14) 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 15 

ship is the rule with those who remain. Hence 
failure is the rule, and high success the excep- 
tion. 

4. The clogging of schools may be practi- 
cally, if not entirely relieved, by devoting half 
the teaching force to individual instruction, 
(a) By directing attention definitely to the 
point where the pinch or clog occurs, (b) By 
operating upon the dilTficulty according to its 
exact nature and without resort to any kind 
of force. 

5. Individual attention involves no strain 
on the teacher and no violence to the pupil; 
hence it tends to that condition of repose and 
equipoise essential to good teaching and to suc- 
cessful study. 

6. Individual teaching tends to check all 
lagging and flagging, whether resulting from 
discouragement or lack of interest, and to pro- 
mote a general forward movement in the student 
ranks, (a) It sustains the interest of the bright- 
er pupils by permitting them to move on, and 



16 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

by doing away with the irksome deadlocks, 
repetitions and tragic struggles of the recita- 
tion, (b) It brings forward the slower pupils 
by recognizing their real trouble, by saving 
them from public exposure and persecution, by 
gently leading them back from chaos to where 
the ground is solid under their feet, by giving 
them direction, and by awakening within them 
confidence in their own powers. 

7. Individual instruction is quite as potent 
and essential in the moral as in the intellectual 
training of youth, (a) The will to do what is 
right and wholesome is an expression of moral 
health, (b) Failure tends to unsettle character 
and to pervert the will. Under failure there is 
a giving way of either physical or moral health, 
sometimes of both. 

8. Individual instruction is a definitely re- 
stricted agency in the education of youth, (a) 
Its function is strictly remedial ; it addresses it- 
self solely to disturbed conditions, (b) Its 
end is attained in the restoration of desirable 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 17 

conditions, (c) It brings about its own elimi- 
nation and gives way when the conditions for 
exclusive class instruction are ideal. 

9. Class instruction is the normal and perma- 
nent form of the best education of youth. It 
supplies (a) the spur of emulation, (b) the stimu- 
lus of numbers, (c) the attrition of mind upon 
mind, (d) the side lights from many minds, (e) 
a greater breadth of teaching than can be given 
to an individual, and (f) an experience in think- 
ing and doing in the presence of a public. 

10. Only through the restorative effects of 
individual instruction can a school reach any- 
thing like ideal conditions for class work, and 
only through the constant operation of indi- 
vidual instruction can those conditions be main- 
tained. Therefore, individual instruction is a 
constantly necessary phase of school activity, 
the constant and necessary supplement and 
corrective of class teaching. 

11. Individual instruction involves no in- 
crease of labor or expense in the education of 
youth, but rather the reduction of both. 



18 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

12. Finally, statistics show that schools pro- 
vided with systematic individual instruction 
carry their pupils to higher stages of advance- 
ment and give them sounder scholarship than 
do. schools which lack this agency. 



Chapter III 

Results in Batavia* 

We have in Batavia learned the very great 
importance of individual instruction, and have 
committed ourselves to it fully. It is scarcely 
too much to say that our school system has un- 
dergone a revolution. Our experiment has not 
taught us to believe that individual instruction 
will ever be the prime pillar of education or even 
be the normal form of teaching. We are more 
convinced than ever before that children will 
continue to be assembled in classes, to be drilled 
and trained and educated in the presence of 
their fellows. In classes only can they get the 
needed spur of emulation, the attrition of mind 
upon mind, the helpful sidelights from many 
minds, and the breadth of teaching which is 
compelled by the presence of numbers. 



* From an address delivered at Lakewood, N. Y. 

(19) 



20 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

To start a great school-system forward on 
purely class-instruction however is like starting 
a great army forward without its medical ser- 
vice. There will soon be culminative distress, 
misery, suffering, despair, loss, depletion. 

It is .no mere figure of speech that charges 
up distress and suffering to schools. The work 
of the class is guaged to average capacity. Fully 
half the children are below that average, and 
are dragging despairingly in the rear. Their 
dragging is a peril to themselves and an inflic- 
tion to the rest. Their dragging is also a posi- 
tive peril to the teacher. Distress tends to 
awaken sympathy; but when the distress is 
hanging about your neck and tending to drag 
you under, your sympathy turns to a fierce 
struggle for yourself. Half the class is com- 
posed of children dragging down their teacher. 
And how about the other half? They are child- 
ren tethered either to an immovable obstruc- 
tion or to one moving so slowly as to be insuffer- 
ably irksome. These children are in just as 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 21 

much danger as the others. Depletion will 
begin on both sides of the line. Loss of interest 
is about as fatal as loss of courage. 

We saw at last the better way. And our re- 
cent years have been years of thanksgiving. 
In these years, we have opened no graves; in 
these years, we have broken no hearts; in these 
years, we have wrecked no lives; in these years, 
we have touched no child except for his or her 
good; in these years, we have had the hearts of 
our children filled with song, and we have made 
teaching a most salubrious business for our 
teachers. In these years we have taken all the 
obliquity out of our grades. In these years, we 
have reduced depletion to a most wonderful 
minimum. Out of what would have been the 
wrecks of our former system, we have given to 
our high school a great rate of increase. In 
these years, we have almost absolutely banished 
disorder, and have promoted a marked devel- 
opment of character. In these years no drudg- 
ery has been forced back upon the homes ; and 



22 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

no sob in the household has had its origin in the 
school. And so I might go on indefinitely, de- 
picting the difference between a school that 
was sick and a school that is well. 

And the remedy for those evils is so simple 
that it will always be a matter of wonder that 
it was never thought of and applied before. 
Remedies are likely to be simple. 

We did not have to wait weeks and months 
to see the effect of individual instruction on that 
room. The effect was instantaneous. There 
was suddenly one room in which there was noth- 
ing the matter. The teacher who had been 
finding it all wrong, suddenly found it all right. 
And it staid all right. Though she had been on 
the verge of hysterics with forty-nine she was as 
happy as a parent bird when the number had 
swollen to seventy-nine. And every additional 
new-comer, caused a smile to irradiate her 
features. The same children that had been 
killing her cured her. She suddenly discovered 
that there was nothing the matter with her. 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 23 

Where she had been nagging the forty-nine she 
was clucking the seventy-nine. And not one 
of them doubted that she was their dearest 
friend, and not one of them failed to be regarded 
as the rarest child on earth. 

And her power expanded pari passu with her 
affections. She laid out broader schemes of 
work. A healthy mind and a warm heart went 
foraging for the children. The course of studies 
became a mere skeleton on which she built the 
rich materials of her own providing. 

And. we observed in her what we have since 
observed in all the rest of our teachers, that it 
was a great benefit to her to be there under those 
conditions. She was no longer a martyr to 
education. She took on health continually, 
and with it she took on that comeliness that is 
given only by ripening intelligence and expand- 
ing sympathies. It is safe to say that no one in 
that room derived greater benefit from being 
there, than she did herself. 

She became part of the social life of the town. 



24 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

And her great stock of vigor made her quite 
ready for social demands. And from her con- 
tact with refined circles she brought back an 
increasing refinement and breadth of view to 
lavish upon the children. The hysterical teach- 
er has no vitality left for social demands and 
nobody wants her. Since the introduction of 
individual instruction the teachers have become 
the foremost ladies of the place. And they not 
only bear themselves off well, btit they are prov- 
ing themselves a valuable leaven in the circles 
where formerly they were not in demand. They 
are showing a lively interest in art, history, 
sociology, and all that relates to the improve- 
ment of society. 

Now as to the children. The change in their 
case was just as striking and just as sudden as 
in the case of the teacher. Almost instantly 
it became manifest that no child in that room 
was under the harrow ; no child there was fighting 
down a bitter thought or stifling a sob ; no child 
there was breaking its heart in pathetic silence; 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 25 

no child there was wearily waiting for the great 
machine to move on ; no child there was turning 
in desperation to that well-known party who 
"always finds some mischief still for idle hands 
to do". All were infused with the spirit of 
zealous enterprise, and the upraised hands and 
bright, cheerful faces eloquently reflected the 
happiness that was singing at the heart. 

We revelled in our new-found bliss for fully 
a year and a half before we said a word about it. 
we wanted to study it undisturbed; we wanted 
to test it fully; we wanted to make sure of it. 
We knew that a good thing needs no exploita- 
tion, and that a bad thing should not be ex- 
ploited. When we did speak it was in response 
to an official inquiry from the State Superin- 
tendent as to what new departures had been 
undertaken. Since then the literature of the 
matter has been unfolding. 

But to return. We noticed that the slant 
and echelon quickly began to vanish from the 
room, and the whole grade began to move for- 



26 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

ward at a rate that satisfied everybody and 
distressed nobody. And at the end of the year 
we promoted the entire room. And before the 
end of the year we had no occasion to push for- 
ward anybody. But we quickly noticed the 
effect upon our register. We noticed that the 
rate of attendance rapidly waxed, and the rate 
of absence rapidly waned. We noticed a ten- 
dency toward a maximum of attendance; and 
it became no uncommon thing to strike that 
maximum, to have actually a hundred per cent 
present. We learned that happy children are 
not prone to get sick, and that interested child- 
ren are not detained out for trifling causes. 

We learned that all children may be educated. 
W^e have found our brightest scholars at the 
lowest end of our slanting line, and we have 
found our strongest characters there. Under 
our old system those were foredoomed. Their 
disappearance was known to be only a question 
of time, and I fear that it was a consummation 
only too devoutly wished. Despair on one side 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 27 

and resentment on the other could have but one 
termination. 

It is true that some minds are woefully slow 
at the outset, but that is no proof of incapa- 
bility. The worst error of teachers is to assume 
incapability and therefore to repudiate responsi- 
bility. You have in this error the cause of 
much of the depletion in schools. The fact is 
that the heritage of the average child is a heri- 
tage of capability; the amount of real incapa- 
bility is so small that it may be dismissed as no 
appreciable element in our problem. The pro- 
per attitude of mind in a teacher is to assume 
capability, and then struggle sympathetically 
and intelligently to make that capability active. 
Once aroused to confidence in its powers, the 
slow mind retains its momentum, and is ever 
after the best and most reliable in the school 
and in the world. Class-teaching sweeps over 
such a mind, or would hurry it along with the 
lash. Individual instruction knows no lash. 
It bends in intelligent sympathy to the real 



28 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

difficulty, puts courage into the despairing soul, 
arranges a sequence of efforts, and gradually 
calls forth or builds up victorious independence. 
Now to arrest decimation and depletion is to 
have a most wonderful effect upon the size,, 
spirit, and results of a school. But there is 
another side to the decimation and depletion 
that is not always understood. And that is the 
condition of the eliminated. They not only 
disappear, but they disappear injured. The 
mental and moral injuries may be for the present 
somewhat vague and obscure; but the physical 
injuries are all too real. The amount of physi- 
cal injury alone that has its origin in schools is 
very great. Schools as disease centres are 
receiving the deepest attention of hygienists. 
I am persuaded that where individual' instruc- 
tion is provided, no child will become sick in 
consequence of going to school. And further- 
more I am convinced that an ailing child may 
be restored to health by being placed in such a 
school. 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 29 

And so I might go on indefinitely, depicting 
the transformation which individual instruc- 
tion has effected in our children. There is 
scarcely any end to the subject, and the bene- 
fits are manifold. The old system was a long 
catalogue of injurious tendencies; the new sys- 
tem is by contrast an endless list of benefits. 

But every effect has its cause. We have been 
considering most wonderful effects upon both 
children and teachers, as well as upon the com- 
munity. Let us now turn to the cause. The 
cause is in that quiet second teacher, who is not 
heard at all, and is scarcely seen, the teacher 
who went in there to give all her time to in- 
dividual teaching. Our grades run with perfect 
smoothness and perfect safety since we have 
had some one around to look after and restore 
conditions. I know no vehicle that becomes 
more suddenly fouled and unworkable than a 
large class of children, and we have recently 
learned that no vehicle may be more promptly 
or completely relieved. And unless relieved, 



30 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

the graded school system becomes organized 
injury. 

The mental and moral injuries are no less 
real and deplorable than those of a physical 
nature. School is a most profitable place for 
those who are interested in their studies and 
who are doing well in them; it is a most per- 
nicious place for those who are doing poorly. 

But many a parent springs to the rescue of 
his boy before it is too late; he takes him out 
of school to save him. And he either puts him 
into a workshop to learn habits of industry, 
and to acquire the art of self-support, or he 
places him in a special school where he will re- 
ceive the personal attention which his peculiar 
weaknesses demand. And here we have another 
cause of the depletion of public schools. 

This great unrest is interpreted in various 
ways ; but I think that its real explanation is a 
growing public consciousness of the failure of 
machinery and organization in and of them- 
selves to accomplish the proper education and 
development of childhood and youth. 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 31 

Our new departure amounted to a decided 
innovation, and we were somewhat curious to 
see how the people would regard it. It was 
instantly universally popular. All classes ap- 
plauded it. They said that it was the most 
sensible thing ever thought of, to set apart a 
teacher to get the children out of their trouble. 
And the popularity shows no sign of waning. 

The work of our second teacher may be under- 
stood perhaps from her instructions, which were 
to find the weak spots in the room and make 
them the strong spots, to find the laggards and 
bring them forward. The measure of her work 
is the condition of the room. Her work may 
be called, what it truly is, ministration. The 
work of a ministering angel is never noisy nor 
ostentatious, but it is the very breath of life 
to those upon whom it is exercised. I have 
perhaps already shown that the class-teacher 
of the room had herself become filled with the 
spirit of ministry. 

We were wishing for other overflowing rooms, 



32 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

that we might extend this dual system. And 
six times in the interim they have been relieved 
in the same way. And every time the results 
have been exactly the same, confirming our 
belief that we have found a most powerful work- 
ing principle of education. 

But how about the rooms that were not over- 
flowing? We did not feel that it was necessary 
to put two teachers to doing the work of one. 
We resolved to vary the experiment and make 
each single teacher an individual instructor 
half the time. The effect was quite as surpris- 
ing as in the case of the two teachers. The 
single teacher brought forward her own laggards, 
relieved her room, and brought it into a condi- 
tion comparing very favorably with that pre- 
vailing in the two-teacher rooms. So we have 
individual instruction throughout our entire 
system. 

This is the Batavia system of combined in- 
dividual and class instruction, a system which 
we have been carefully observing and testing 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 33 

for the past three years, and which I think need 
not any longer be called the Batavia experiment. 

It is the merit of our system that it involves 
no backward step ; it is not in the slightest degree 
destructive. It utilizes every bit of the graded 
school plant and frame-work, and even the 
graded school instruction. It is, as we see it, 
a great step forward. It takes the graded school 
with all its advantages and would put that 
school into the best working condition. It is 
the graded school transformed, we might almost 
say transfigured. 

It is the graded school shaking off all its 
destructive tendencies and taking on the ten- 
dency to unalloyed beneficence. It is, we be- 
lieve, the evolution of the graded school. 

Wherever multitudes are to be dealt with 
in any way some kind of organization is a prime 
necessity. In order to subject our great mul- 
titudes of children to educational processes, 
some kind of organization is fundamentally 
necessary. It would be financially impossible 



'34 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

to place a tutor with every child, or in every 
household. And we have already shown that 
if it were possible, it is not desirable. The 
children need to be assembled with their fellows, 
and economy of service requires that they should 
be brought together in groups. 

The graded-school system admirably meets 
this two-fold necessity. It is a superb organiza- 
tion of the children who are to be subjected to 
processes of education. It is one of the great 
contributions of the nineteenth century, and a 
decided gain to the world. We cannot over- 
estimate its great value and usefulness. It 
makes universal education in the great centres 
of population possible. 

But neither should we overlook its unfinished 
condition. It stopped short of completion. 
And in that incompleteness lies all its deadly 
possibilities. It is the steam-boiler without the 
governor, the steam engine without the fly- 
wheel. It receives an ill-regulated force and 
applies it spasmodically and without modera- 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 35 

tion. It is a great invention lacking some 
finishing pieces. 

Such lack in material invention is the defect 
in the logic of the inventor. But no inventor 
expects his first machine to be worth anything. 
He knows that he does not see his way through ; 
he knows that he does not foresee every contin- 
gency. He knows that he must eventually 
supplement his a priori ideas with those that 
come to him a posteriori, before he will have a 
thoroughly adjusted instrument. His principle 
is his own inspiration, but he must get his crown- 
ing adjustments from trial. 

And so the great graded school system, spring- 
ing from a mighty conception, is yet working 
somewhat at random and with much destruc- 
tive crankiness because of not having its finish- 
ing adjustments. 



Chapter IV 

Official Report to Albany* 

The Batavia schools enjoy the distinction of 
giving the world something entirely new in edu- 
cational methods, something that was given a 
thorough trial last year and proved so unquali- 
fied a success that it is likely to revolutionize 
the public school systems of the entire country. 
It has already attracted the attention of famous 
educators and is being thoroughly investigated 
by them. The following report, made by 
Superintendent Kennedy to the Hon. Charles 
R. Skinner, Superintendent of the State Depart- 
ment of Public Instruction, and forwarded to 
Albany today, explains in detail the workings 
of the new system and the results obtained from 
it during the past year: 

"In reporting the workings of our school the 
past year we have to make mention of one very 



*From the Batavia Daily News. 

(36) 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 37 

marked departure. We have been dividing 
our rooms as rapidly as they overflow, but we 
had an overflowing room this past year that 
we decided not to divide. As the room was very 
large, thus giving no trouble on the score of air 
space, or hygienic conditions, it occurred to us 
to try the experiment of placing an extra teacher 
in the room, who would do only individual work 
and do it silently. 

"The effect has been at once a revelation and 
a revolution. It revealed to us how to lift from 
our graded school system the reproach of giving 
insufficient individual instruction. We seemed 
to stand between education en masse and chaos. 
We shall hereafter have no temptation to return 
to chaos. We have discovered how to get the 
benefit of organization, and, at the same time, 
reach the needs of individuals. We have al- 
ready extended the new system to a second 
room, with the same noticeable and gratifying 
results as in the first instance. 

"Those results are (a) removal of discourage- 



38 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

ment. Children who have been falhng to the 
rear and becoming drags, either by reason of 
slowmindedness, or by reason of unavoidable 
absence, have been delighted to have some one 
show them a way out of their trouble. They 
have taken courage and moved forward into 
line, causing (b) an evenness in the grades that 
was never known under the old graded school 
system. And their coming forward caused (c) 
a more rapid movement in the entire grade, so 
that those who do not get the individual in- 
struction directly, get it, and all the benefits 
of it, indirectly. And (d) the joy of the parents 
at the idea of the children getting individual 
attention and getting on, is touching. And 

(e) the enthusiasm of the taxpayers in general 
is quite as great as that of the immediate pat- 
rons. We are indebted for the new name of 
our system to one of the large taxpayers who 
does not now send children to the schools. And 

(f) we save yearly a large sum on the cost of 
heating, janitoring, and rent of rooms." 



Chapter V 

Relation to Class Teaching* 

The Batavia system has been in operation 
nearly seven years, having been started in 
November 1898. It originated in the observa- 
tion that unrectified mass-teaching does not 
work, or works only widespread disaster. The 
Batavia system supplies the corrective in the 
form of individual teaching. It does not abolish 
class teaching; but it frees the latter from clogs 
and renders it operative; it not only enables 
class-teaching to move forward freely and un- 
obstructed, but it takes from it every tendency 
to crush and grind. It is the corrector and the 
coadjutor of class teaching, rather than its dis- 
placer. That children who are falling to the 
rear in their studies suffer keenly, pitifully, 
often dangerously, I think none will deny. The 



*The next six chapters are from an address delivered at 
Westerly, R. I. 

(39) 



40 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

sob may be stifled in the school, but it breaks 
out in convulsions on the mother's breast at 
home; or it is revealed on wakeful couches, or 
in the mutterings of restless sleep. Well for 
the mother if it is not revealed in the delirium 
of consuming fever. 

Parents suffer with their children; the grief 
of the child is anguish to the parents ; the trouble 
of the child is a double extra labor to the parent, 
already exhausted with the daily burden of life ; 
the extra labor of teaching and explaining; the 
worrying labor of teaching what parents them- 
selves do not always understand ; the discourag- 
ing labor of teaching in a state of exhaustion 
those who are not in a receptive condition; the 
extra labor moreover of ministering in the lonely 
watches of the night. Well for the children if 
it is not the mother's brow that is attacked with 
the consuming fever. 

Teachers suffer with the children. With 
backward dragging children hanging like a dead 
load on her strength, the teacher soon becomes 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 41 

conscious of worry and over-strain; and worry 
and over-strain work with accelerated speed 
toward collapse. Then arises the spectre of a 
new worry to hasten the catastrophe ; the worry 
about a future of helplessness totally unpro- 
vided for. 

But the public suffer with the children, the 
parents, and the teachers. The ancient plagues 
are vanishing before the militant campaigns of 
modern sanitation. But a new plague is sweep- 
ing over the world and claiming its victims by 
the myriad. This is the plage of nervous de- 
bility or neurasthenia. We say that our ner- 
vousness comes from the fierce competitions 
of the business world, oblivious as yet to the 
fact that the cause is largely in the schools. 
The public suffers further; it suffers in the loss 
of those who should be its pride, its hope, its 
assured protection; it suffers by the presence 
of those who are its annoyance, its menace, its 
danger. The Batavia system tends to arrest 
all that. Incorrigibi lity and genuine interest 



42 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

and joy in school work are almost absolutely 
incompatible, if they are not an actual contra- 
diction in terms. 

Six years ago it occurred to Batavia to assign 
teachers to give personal attention to the back- 
ward and distressed children ; to sit by their side ; 
to wipe away their tears ; to dispel their despair ; 
to quiet their apprehensions; to warm them up 
with assured sympathy ; to give them that com- 
posure of spirit that would render mental action 
possible; to train their attention; to train their 
apprehension; to train their reasoning; to train 
them in the art of self-appropriation ; to awaken 
their confidence; to fill them with joyful hope; 
to arouse their ambition ; and to send them back 
to their classes filled not only with the spirit of 
confidence but with the very spirit of challenge. 

The Batavia system conserves and makes use 
of about all the old school plant ; yet its maxims 
and philosophy diverge so far from the old that 
it might almost be called a new education. It 
requires either that half the teachers shall be 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 43 

assigned to individual teaching, or that half 
the time of single teachers shall be employed 
on individuals. This is the quantitative feature. 
This individual teaching, as employed in Bata- 
via, is an entirely new factor in education, based 
upon maxims that are entirely new, and leading 
to results that are surprising to all who see them. 
In the past six years the schools of Batavia 
have sent back only sunshine, safety and happi- 
ness to the homes. Happy schools make happy 
homes; in happy homes the children sleep and 
bloom;, in happy homes the parents sleep and 
retain the bloom so needful to their children. 
In happy homes there is little need of the doctor, 
less need of those who often succeed the doctor. 
And the parents are prompt to recognize the 
change. The Batavia parents said immediate- 
ly: "You have brought sunshine into our 
homes." A visiting school officer after passing 
through a few of our rooms ceased to be a school 
officer and became only a father; he ejaculated: 
"One thing is certain; this system must go to 



44 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

my town or my two little girls must come up 
here. I have had one daughter wrecked by 
that old harsh system and I don't propose to 
take any chances on the other two." 

"I look around in vain for the anaemic child; 
I see only bloom, wonderful beauty, and spark- 
ling happiness. It makes me long to see the 
people that will be walking the streets twenty- 
five years hence." So spoke a distinguished 
educational leader and writer, an expert in al- 
most every phase of educational work. 

Happy schools and happy homes meet every 
desire of childhood; in them and by them the 
children are safe-guarded from moral danger. 
In the past six years no child below the high 
school has been required to take home a single 
task. School hours are sacred to sweet labor; 
but labor, be it ever so sweet, is not permitted 
to trench upon other demands of life ; it is locked 
in with the books and empty benches when the 
key turns at three. Back work of any kind, 
whether due to slowness of mind or temporary 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 45 

absence, is treated as an arrear that belongs 
solely to the school, and by no means to the 
honie nor to the. parents. And those arrears 
are reached during school hours in a regular 
and legitimate way, and not by a special 
imprisonment after school, in which unhappy 
children are required to meet in the character 
of delinquents teachers who are in a state of 
uncharitable exhaustion. The Batavia system 
makes provision for every possible contingency, 
and what cannot, and should not, be evaded, 
is reached under conditions that are entirely 
normal and salutary. Nothing that should be 
done is omitted and nothing that is done is done 
in the spirit of fret and fury. 

Worry is all gone; no one worries any more, 
neither teacher nor children. And where worry 
is gone there can scarcely be any over-work or 
over-strain. The old proverb well says: "Not 
work but worry that kills." Under nervous 
depletion any work is over-work ; any work then 
is dangerous. With good nervous vigor one 



46 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

could almost work the twenty-four hours 
through. With nervous depletion there is awful 
danger even in a thoroughly sanitary school- 
building ; with nervous vigor and spiritual seren- 
ity, one might teach school safely under very 
bad sanitary conditions. 



Chapter VI 

Children Retained in School 

It must be conceded that many causes out- 
side of schools, and for which the schools are not 
at all responsible, contribute to the emptying 
of schools. But when all that may be justly 
charged up to those outside causes are massed 
into an aggregate, they will be found to consti- 
tute a mere rill compared to the great stream 
discharged by the school itself. The untaught 
must go. 

Every school child is at every moment at a 
crisis in his career. He needs not only freedom 
from actual violence, but he needs immediately 
that active and sympathetic guidance and en- 
couragement that are the determining factors 
in his career. His case will not wait. There 
is little hope of resuscitation. His only hope 
is in formation, not in reformation. And a 

(47) 



48 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM i 

school that would save even a driblet must be 
just to all. 

"There is a tide in the affairs of (children) 
Which, taken at its flood, leads on to fortune; 
Omitted, all the voyage of their life 
Is bound in shallows and in miseries."- 

Evil finds its readiest recruits in the victims 
of injustice. When the school has lost all 
charm then other charmers are without compe- 
tition. The street appeals where the school 
loses its appeal ; and the street can make a very 
active hoodlum out of a very torpid school-boy. 
To inflict the slightest injustice in the school 
is to play into the hands of the street. But the 
drags stay in school long enough to affect the 
moral stamina even of the quick. The school 
will lose its charm to those who are retarded as 
well as to those who are downtrodden; the 
stream of disappearance is not restricted to 
those of slow or timid apprehension. 

The Batavia system is no Darwinian machine 
grinding down the nineties in the hope that the 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 49 

fives or tens may be saved. The fives or tens 
may survive, but they are not saved. The 
golden opportunity of childhood, that opportu- 
nity which can never be recalled, that tide 
which presents its flood but once, is lost to two 
classes of children, to those who are dragging, 
and to those who are dragged ; and that is about 
all of them; for about all the children in school 
may be classed either as drags or dragged. 

The Batavia system is not a place for getting 
rid of children; it is a place for retaining them. 
No child in the Batavia system is a persona non 
grata ; no child in the Batavia system is crowded 
to the wall, and through it into the street. As 
a result the great vacuities in the upper stories 
have been filling up ; the high school has doubled ; 
and grades strong in numbers and strong in 
confidence and in study power are surging 
around its threshold. 

Interest in their studies is proving to the 
Batavia children a great moral safeguard; and 
an atmosphere of spiritual repose, and teachers 



50 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

who are sane, sympathetic, and just, are pro- 
moting a growth in goodness that is very re- 
markable. 

Of the increase in the high school nearly 
seventy per cent, is boys. If you would get a 
test of the efficiency of a school system, count 
the boys in the upper stories. Boys succumb 
more easily than girls to unjust or flabby work 
in schools ; boys have more inducements to leave 
school than girls have; boys are more exposed 
than girls to influences that work against the 
school; boys are more likely to be withdrawn 
from school than girls are. We say that they 
are withdrawn to help keep the wolf from the 
family door. This is sometimes true. It is 
oftener true that they are withdrawn to keep 
them from becoming an actual burden on the 
family. The teeth of the suppositious wolf 
grow very dull when the boys are keenly inter- 
ested in their school work and are making every 
moment tell for improvement. The string of 
withdrawal is not on the dilligent boy; it is on 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 51 

the boy who is beginning to grow Hmp. And 
parental wisdom never did itself more credit 
than in the withdrawal of such boys. The wolf 
bogie serves as the excuse, not as the cause. 
Nothing is more fully established than the fact 
that parents will make the last sacrifice to keep 
in school the boys who are doing well there. 

But there are other compensations than 
money. "Blessed are the merciful for they 
shall obtain mercy;" since our teachers have 
been lifting from their children the load of 
sorrow and discouragement, they have been 
lifting every crushing load from themselves. 
And now they are able to live their lives. They 
are not now so nervewrecked and exhausted as 
to have to shun society. They now want it, 
and they now are wanted ; they get their growth 
in the social graces, in the ease of manner, and 
in the broadening of thought which contact 
with society alone can give ; and they bring back 
that increased grace and strength to bear upon 
the cultivation of their pupils. To enrich the 



52 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

course of studies just enrich the teachers; they 
will then treat the course of studies as a mere 
frame-work on which to build the honey stores 
of their own providing. And in addition to 
this the teacher has the comfort of health and 
assured longevity. 



Chapter VII 

Expense Reduced 

But does not this two-teacher system in- 
crease the expense? No, it reduces the expense. 
There are actually fewer teachers in Batavia than 
there would have been if the Batavia system 
had never been thought of. With a team of 
teachers you can assemble more than two sets 
of children, if your room is large enough; and 
the stimulus of a large assembly will be a benefit 
to all, both children and teachers. With large 
classes that are free from drags, the teacher 
teaches better and with greater ease. The 
orator needs large houses; it is death to speak 
to empty benches. And how he does plead 
with the sparse audience to gather up around 
him. And so it is in class work; the teacher 
finds a supporting bouyancy in interested mem- 
bers; and they call out from her a breadth and 

(53) 



54 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

depth of teaching that would be impossible with 
a few. And the children in large classes that 
have no drags, get more, and more varied stimu- 
lus than in a small one. There is the very- 
momentum of numbers; there is supplied the 
spur of emulation ; there is the attrition of many 
minds upon each single mind; there are the 
sidelights and suggestions that come from many 
points of view. But especially there is an 
audience, a public in miniature, in which the 
child can train himself, or be trained, to public 
action and ultimate civic usefulness. The child 
is on his way to community life, and the large 
class supplies the means for a community train- 
ing. The conditions of modern life, the econo- 
mies of the situation, the nature of the child, 
and the laws of teaching, all require that the 
children shall be massed. But a mass and a 
herd are very much alike; and therein lies all 
the danger in wholesale education. Indeed a 
herd is a mass, and there is where the destruc- 
tive fallacy enters. The children need to be 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 55 

massed, but education must see that they are 
never herded. 

On the other hand there is no greater fallacy 
than to try to solve the school question by cut- 
ting up the class into small groups. If this is 
done for the purpose of reaching the individual, 
it does not reach him. It quadruples the ex- 
pense of education only to emasculate it. Hor- 
ace Greeley said that the way to resume specie 
payments is to resume. The way to reach the 
individual is to reach him. But how if the 
groups are made of those of equal aptness? In 
other words how about forming quick sections 
and slow sections? Yes, how about branding 
the children? Was there not suffering enough 
without attacking the child's pride? 

In the Batavia system where the work of 
two teachers is not needed the single teacher 
carries the burden alone. And she does it well. 
She does her individual work, and she does her 
class work; and she does both equally well, in 
equal intervals of time. She takes care of 



56 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

everybody and takes care of all ; and she has no 
need to blush for her results as compared with 
those in the two-teacher rooms. The Batavia 
rule is, fifty children or more, two teachers; 
fewer than fifty, one teacher. 

But how about an ungraded room for lag- 
gards? Our doctrine is that any segregation 
whatsoever is unnecessary, unwise, and unjust. 
The ungraded room seems to us the most ob- 
jectionable form of segregation. It is a quasi 
penal institution, designed primarily for truants 
and incorrigibles. And possibly it is the proper 
means of treating juvenile delinquents. But 
how about "running in" children who have been 
guilty of no offense whatever? children who 
are only in trouble? and herding them in a penal 
institution with criminals? How about sending 
a child to "do time" simply because he has been 
out a week or two with sickness? 

I am not sure that even truancy and incorri- 
gibility may not be reached best by the justice 
and sympathy of the regular grade room. Even 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 57 

violent incorrigibility is amenable to good 
treatment; Botticelli's masterpiece represents 
Lady Wisdom quieting the fierce centaur with 
the hand of genuine friendship. The wild 
creature is as amazed as a wild boy at finding 
somebody entertaining kindly feeling for him. 



Chapter VIII 

Independence Developed 

But will not individual teaching train the 
children to lean and depend upon others? No, 
individual teaching will not do that; individual 
spoiling will do it. The individual teachers of 
Batavia train their subjects to self-confidence, 
self-reliance, and initiative. The trainer in any 
physical exercise stays near" his pupil; but he 
throws the pupil to the utmost limit upon his 
own exertions. The individual teacher is just 
such a wise and efficient trainer. The real 
education of the children consists in their train- 
ing ; and training is largely an individual matter. 
It does not consist in assigning and hearing 
lessons. That is the way of evading the labors 
and duties of teaching; that is a way of calling 
upon children to educate themselves. The in- 
justice that is depopulating schools and break- 

(58) 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 59 

ing down education, consists in asking multi- 
tudes of unhappy children to educate them- 
selves; of asking them to perform the impossible. 
There comes a time when the very discipline 
that the child needs is to be required to address 
himself to assigned work, and make his own 
independent preparation. And every trained 
child welcomes the requirement when it reaches 
him in due course. When he can face assigned 
work with confidence and zest, his education 
and career are assured. Individual teaching 
has its goal in self -activity ; it is not a form of 
education; it is only an essential factor, which 
cannot be omitted without wholesale disaster. 
If we would succeed we must recognize the 
conditions and laws of success. The Batavia 
system guards against any unwise or injudi- 
cious help by two restricting "don'ts": don't 
tell the child anything but see that he knows 
that thing; that is lead his mind; train his 
attention and train his mind to perceive and 
apprehend; second, don't do anything for the 



60 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

child, but see that his work is done by himself; 
that is, train him to initiative, train him to find 
the sequent steps in a process. This is to make 
strong and stalwart, not weak. There is no 
coddling in individual teaching; the severest 
of training is that which is given at close range. 
The individual teacher is fighting for a mind, 
fighting for a career, and winning the battle 
every time. It is great teaching; and it makes 
great teachers; and great teachers can do great 
teaching. It is great teaching because it is 
real, because it is rooted and grounded in ob- 
servation of real childish minds. There are 
many people who dote upon the quick. Those 
who bend their attention seriously to the prob- 
lem of child study, as our individual teachers 
do, will find many reasons for the existence of 
slow children. Among other things they are 
sent to be our teachers; no normal school and 
no teachers' college can illuminate the under- 
standing and improve the skill of a teacher as 
can a slow child. *'Out of the mouth of babes" 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 61 

Cometh our instruction. It is the slow child 
who opens the teacher's eyes, when she once 
assumes that he is not a hopeless blockhead. 
And a sympathetic teacher learns to thank the 
momentary unresponsiveness of the child. 
Where does she see her greatest triumphs? 
Where does she find her highest gratifications? 
Where does she recognize the causes of her 
ripened wisdom and science? In the children 
who once were slow; in the children who once 
set her meditating; in the children who once 
taxed her ingenuity; in the children who once 
called out her last reserves. The greater the 
struggle, the more obstinate the obstacle, the 
greater the triumph. 

But the slow child does a higher service to 
the teacher than opening her mind; he opens 
her heart. The teacher cannot fail to love the 
child whom she has won out of trouble. And 
the teacher who has learned to love a child has 
learned to love children. And the love of 
children promotes that sympathy, tolerance. 



62 THE B ATA VI A SYSTEM 

charity, which are the very crowns of human 
character. Look over the world for the richest 
and ripest character; it is the mother who has 
had the well-spring of her sympathies stirred, 
who has poured out her life upon others; and 
after all she is the richest of all. There is a 
giving that impoverishes not, but mightily en- 
riches the giver. This heart growth, this ripen- 
ing of the sympathies, is the greatest reward 
of all that comes to the teacher for being faith- 
ful in the discharge of all her sacred duties. A 
sweet benignity alone is the badge of noble and 
successful living. And what a power this sweet 
benignity has for evoking order, contentment, 
good conduct. Order needs only a rallying 
point. And what a steady hand and clear eye 
this sweet benignity has when it comes to weigh- 
ing an offense; it never sees a mountain in a 
molehill; it never senses a hurricane in a zephyr. 
And it always opens the door to reformation, 
holding sentence in suspension. 

The Batavia system has still another check 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING. 63 

upon possibly injurious individual attention; 
the teacher alone decides where her attention 
will be given; she retains the initiative; the 
children cannot "work" the teacher; they 
have the comfort of knowing that their helper 
will not forget them, but they cannot precipi- 
tate the help. They struggle alone with pa- 
tience until they are reached. And while noth- 
ing is looked upon as invidious, yet they have 
learned to look upon the struggling alone as a 
compliment. While no one is exposed to dis- 
couragement, on the other hand no one can feel 
vain, for no one knows who will not be called. 
The prodigy himself is subject to call, and he 
often needs to be called. This individual work 
is never employed on forthcoming lessons; the 
Batavia system is not a coach for indolence, 
laziness, or even timidity; it is employed solely 
on children who revealed weakness in previous 
lessons ; it is employed solely on back work ; it 
is leading the children up to the lesson line, but 
not taking them over it. And even the prodigy 



64 ' THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

may at times be in arrears. It does under most 
favorable circumstances what has been attempt- 
ed before under most distressing cir<jumstances. 
It brings forward the laggard. Teachers have 
attempted to bring him forward while a class 
waited; such an attempt was ruin to the class 
and actual torture to the laggard, even where 
it did not end in deliberate persecution. 

The elements of the system are not new; 
individual teaching in some form, and class- 
teaching, are as old as education. But there 
are elements that cannot be taken singly with- 
out great peril. Class-teaching alone is a side- 
draught ; individual teaching alone is stagnation ; 
together they are a system of thoroughly balanc- 
ed forces that the Batavia system claims as 
its principal merit. The high function of the 
superintendent is to be eyes for his laboring 
teachers and inspiration to their faithful hearts. 
A school system sinking under neurasthenia 
will furnish a world of employment to the 
superintendent as a mediator in petty collisions, 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 65 

and leave him little time, strength, or scope for 
functions truly educatioanl. One great result 
of the Batavia system is the emancipation of 
superintendents from details that should never 
reach him, and his installment in the untram- 
meled discharge of the real functions of high 
office. The Batavia system tends to stop 
multitudinous leaks, to arrest all waste of energy 
and to promote every high and useful function. 



Chapter IX 

Organization Humanized 

The education that has broken down is the 
education that has ignored the individual, or 
reached him only through the mass, and reached 
him then in the spirit of resentment, because 
he obstructed the mass. That education is 
now confronted with one that does not break 
down; with one that seciires the individual first 
and reaches the mass later; with one that is 
hospitable; with one that gathers the children 
to its bosom instead of shaking them off; with 
one that is fair, honest, and true. 

The Batavia system humanizes organization; 
it prevents organization from becoming a mere 
machine. But machines are very helpful as 
the servants of intelligence. The Batavia sys- 
tem recognizes the great value of educational 
machinery, but it sees to it that the education 

(66) 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 67 

of the children is not delegated to a machine, 
but to intelligent and sympathetic human 
beings. The individual teaching takes away 
everything that is procrustean, and adapts its 
energy to the infinite varieties of mind and 
temperament. A cold machine treats all alike; 
whereas what is thoroughly suitable for one 
may be destructive violence to all the rest. 
The forest leaves have their underlying type 
forms, but no two leaves are exactly alike. No 
two children are exactly alike. We fail in 
teaching through our tendency to generalize; 
we assume children that are not before us ; there 
are no average children, and yet generalized 
education addresses itself to nothing else. If 
we would educate a people we must address 
ourselves to John, George, Mary, and Anna; not 
to boys and girls. Boys and girls are but ghost- 
ly abstractions ; they are not beings of flesh and 
blood. 

A machine may aid in the manufacture of an 
Indian shawl or rug, but when the machine 



68 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

makes the shawl or the rug, the value of the 
product drops to the inverse ratio of a hundred 
fold. You cannot grind out men and women 
for the service of a state ; nor can you grind out 
men and women fitted to taste a real happiness. 
Teaching is a fine art, and every man worth 
looking at must bear the impress of some one's 
loving attention. Teaching is a fine art be- 
cause it is an adaptive art and a creative one; 
it is a fine art because of its individualistic ap- 
plication and because of its endeavor to realize 
the noblest ideals. To treat children as a herd 
is to render education a mechanism rather than 
an art. 

The Batavia system is the reverse of seeking 
lines of least resistance. It attacks the points 
of greatest resistance. It works from the bot- 
tom up, instead of from the top, and never 
getting down ; it works from the bottom up and 
saves all, instead of working from the top and 
shaking off all below the top line. But can all 
work up? They can. There is such a thing 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 69 

as a feeble minded or a defective child who will 
not respond to ordinary teaching. But it is a 
grievous error to class slow children with de- 
fectives, to put the label of idiocy on people 
who in a few years may be carrying on the 
business of the world, and carrying it on with 
most excellent judgment. 

It is a grievous mistake to ascribe to natural 
defectiveness a mere tardiness of response; it 
may be the exact reverse; nature is very chary 
of her Isaac Newtons, her Walter Scotts, her 
U. S. Grants; she surrounds them with a thicker 
bud, a richer chrysalis, that their emergence 
may not be premature. 



Chapter X 

Necessity of Graded Schools 

To determine whether a school system is 
working from the top or from the bottom, look 
at the high schools. Would you insure the 
perpetuity of free institutions, you must make 
the high schools large and strong; you must 
keep adolescence under training. The unity 
and liberty of this great nation cannot be pre- 
served by fourth grade children. Education 
from the bottom is the only hope of the world ; 
education from the top has had its day. 

But how about genius in a school system that 
works from the bottom, and that would carry 
all to a common goal? There is such a thing 
as genius, just as there is such a thing as idiocy; 
they are the extremes of mentality and spirit. 
Genius cannot be predicated of all, but talent 
can be. Genius is very well provided for when 

(70) 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 71 

it is associated with active talent. Active 
talent massed is the greatest educational stimu- 
lus for all, the genius as well as the rest. Genius 
may be wrestling with his own tardy cerements, 
and active talent massed helps him to tear them 
off, and active talent then does him a service 
by giving him something to keep up with. 

The race-horse of education finds his needs 
best supplied in a system that does not address 
itself to race-horses. Education from the bot- 
tom lifts the clogs successively and enables the 
procession to move. The Batavia system 
reaches the need of the race-horse by giving 
him his rein and permitting him to move. It 
does not keep him champing on the bit and 
fretting himself into an exhaustion infinitely 
worse than any race. The Batavia system 
does not ignore the race-horse; it even assigns 
to him a very important function. He is per- 
mitted to determine the rate of motion for the 
mass; not that they are all put instantly on to 
race-horse speed; but they form on him; he 



72 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

carries the guidon, as it were, and they all 
conform to a pace which his energy is giving 
them. Sometimes they even put him on his 
mettle. The worst thing that could be done 
for an educational race-horse would be to ask 
him to go alone, or to go only with a company 
of race-horses. 

To destroy the graded school is to put back 
the clock of time half a century. Segregation 
of any kind is only the beginning of retrogres- 
sion. The solution of the school question is in 
a forward moving aggregation, and such a for- 
ward moving aggregation is ensured by supple- 
mentary individual teaching. But there are 
instances where the same individual is at once 
a leader and a laggard: that is, he is far ahead 
in some subjects and backward in others. Such 
a case was a sore trial to the old graded school, 
and it usually resulted in placing the pupil on / 
his lowest point of efficiency. Such cases do 
not disturb the Batavia system at all ; the child 
is placed at his highest point, very much to his 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 73 

encouragement; he is worked up through his 
backward matter by individual attention. Here- 
in the needed flexibiHty is suppHed to the graded 
school without destroying or marring its valuable 
framework. When you are travelling it is well 
to be able to look over a map of your journey. 
The graded school is the map of childhood's 
progress, fixing his exact location at any point 
of time, and revealing the ultimate goal. This 
supplies a great incentive to forward movement. 
One distressing thing in the district school is the 
lack of definite stages, and its lack of a definite 
goal. The child's record is washed away like 
footprints on the sands of the sea-shore, until 
he becomes wearied of always slipping back, 
and always beginning. Organization has- worked 
downward; to the four years of the college were 
appended the four years of the preparatory or 
high school; and the eight years of the graded 
school finally put every child on the way to the 
university. But under the operation of ex- 
clusive class-teaching this noble framework 



74 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

became a procrustean bed, and we were rushing 
from all over the world to effect its abolition. 
The Batavia system saves the graded school; 
it prevents retrogression. Forward, not back- 
ward, must still be the motto of education, as 
well as that of every other interest in the world. 
Every teacher considers it an easy contract to 
deliver any grade without a single gap in the 
ranks. Prolonged absence alone will now cause 
a normal pupil to fail of covering his grade. 
With individual teaching awaiting the absentee, 
a moderate absence makes now not the slightest 
disturbance. Under the old system such an 
absence was disastrous; the sick child queried 
whether it would make him lose his grade, and 
the very query aggravated his illness. 

And now let me close with a word of prescience 
and prophecy from another. The Batavia 
board of education hesitated not to make its 
own precedent and to give to its children the 
rescue which individual teaching alone can 
supply. When asked to appoint the first in- 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 75 

dividual teacher in the history of education; 
after hearing the reasons therefor, they prompt- 
ly appointed her unanimously. President D. 
W. Tomlinson voiced the thought of all with an 
alliterative utterance that will ring forever in 
the literature of education: "That is not only 
a revelation but a revolution." 



Chapter XI 

Benefits Summarized^ 

Superintendent Kennedy was asked by a 
reporter for The News to enumerate some of the 
benefits derived from the individual instruction 
system, which he originated, and the workings 
of which in the Batavia schools have attracted 
much attention throughout the country. 

"What are the benefits of individual instruc- 
tion? They are legion. It would take columns 
merely to state them. To discuss them would 
require a literature. And I am sure that such 
a literature is forthcoming. I am sure that the 
introduction of individual instruction will rank 
historically as one of the great reforms of this 
age. People have long been aware of the evils 
for which individual instruction is proving a 
sovereign and effective remedy. But they have 



*From the Batavia Daily News 

(76) 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 77 

not seen the remedy. They have almost des- 
paired of a remedy. 

"Individual instruction eliminates about all 
the pressure and over-strain in schoolwork that 
have been destroying both children and teachers. 
Where the corrective of individual instruction 
has been introduced into graded schools the 
teachers think that it is no longer possible for 
either children or teachers to break down. It 
has dispelled all the educational miasma, and 
has irradiated the schools with the sunshine of 
happiness. But it has carried sunshine into the 
homes where chronic misery was wont to reign, 
where threatened children carried home their 
unready tasks to torture unready parents." 



Chapter XII 

The First Individual Teacher 

Lucie Hamilton, the first teacher to use the 
system, pyrites as follows. 

Batavia as a name has long been recognized 
to stand not only for a place but also as an 
educatio7ial idea. The influence which the town 
exerts finds its source and continued inspiration 
in the originator of that idea. Through the 
key note "Individual Instruction is the New 
Ideal" sounded by John Kennedy, we have 
learned that the most successful teaching is 
not done in classes but with individuals. 

Our daily program moves on with increasing 
momentum which carries the whole school 
before it, with no excitement or hysteria, yet 
with enough enthusiasm for self development. 

As a teacher of some experience in the grades 
of the Batavia schools under the old nerve- 

(78) 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 79 

racking, energy-killing method and being the 
first teacher to take up the work under the new 
system, I speak in the interests of many over- 
worked teachers and hundreds of children who 
are not receiving adequate training. 

The plan or system was devised by its origi- 
nator from necessity and has as its foundation 
facts. 

Our success in the work proves that the 
problem of removing the greatest difficulty in 
the practical working of the graded school has 
been removed. 

In 1890 the writer was forced through ill 
health, the result of over- work as a teacher 
struggling with the difficulties inseparable from 
the old-time system of class instruction, to 
give up her work. In 1898 the Batavia System 
was founded. At this time with health some- 
what restored I was recommended by Mr. 
John Kennedy to the position of first individual 
instructor in the Batavia schools, which posi- 
tion, however, was taken with some hesitancy 



80 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

on my part but with positive assurances of 
success on Mr. Kennedy's part. 

Assigned to an over-crowded room having 
sixty-nine pupils, under the training of a single 
teacher, whose health was rapidly failing, the 
work began under the new plan in November, 
1898. Possible dangers were foreseen by Prof. 
Kennedy in connection with the work of the 
individual teacher and there were possible mis- 
apprehensions that might bring about criti- 
cisms; so to us were given three DonHs. 

"First, Don't tell a child anything but see 
that he knows it." 

"Second, Don't do anything for a child but 
see that it is done." 

"Third, Don't do anything upon a lesson 
that has not been recited." 

Through these "don'ts" the individual in- 
structor guarded against the danger of doing 
the work for the pupils instead of teaching them 
how to do it. The individual teacher comes to 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 81 

realize that the largest part of his work is to 
build and not repress. 

From the first the originator of this system 
declared that individual instruction would never 
be the normal form of teaching but that child- 
ren must be assembled in classes, drilled, trained 
and educated in the presence of their classmates, 
because they need the spur of competition. 
But the results are not to be secured by class 
instruction alone. The Batavia system dis- 
closes the fact that children apparently defec- 
tive are often those whose minds are brighter 
than the average and for this reason require a 
different and peculiar development which can 
only be given by individual instruction. 

Under the old system we mechanized the 
work of instruction and training, made all 
pupils do the same work at the same time, in 
the same way. This was the tendency of 
teachers who were young and inexperienced 
and some times the tendency of teachers not 
young and inexperienced. Then we scattered 



82 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

abundant seed but reaped but little or meager 
harvest. We were careful of the type but 
careless of the single life. 

It is in individual work that a knowledge of 
each pupil can be utilized. Teaching can thus 
be adapted to special needs; patience with one, 
firmness with another, trained attention here, 
cultivation of memory there, stimulation of 
confidence with some and a proper guidance 
for all. Today under the new system we think 
less of our schools and more about the boy or 
girl, knowing that the mass will take care of 
itself if the individual is properly cared for. We 
also get a proper recognition of the personality 
of the child through this work. The child has 
a new value. The dull pupil, the laggard was 
found and has been reached and in many cases 
we see him the leader of his class. 

Most satisfactory results have been secured 
in the Batavia schools under the Batavia sys- 
tem during these fifteen years. Each year, 
during that time I have been anchored to a 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 83 

given room in some one of our many schools; 
sometimes to a two-teacher room with two 
grades, then again to a room with two teachers 
and one grade or perhaps one grade with one 
teacher. Always the same satisfactory results, 
seeing the system extended to the relief of many 

rooms, receiving commendations and endorse- 

« 

ments from those who are foremost in educa- 
tional work in the land. 

But the system is not confined to the Batavia 
schools. Several of our teachers have been 
called to the colleges in other states to present 
the work. Some few years ago a request came 
from the University of Virginia at Charlottes- 
ville, to Mr. Kennedy asking for two teachers 
to be sent from the Batavia schools to present 
the Batavia system to the teachers assembled 
for summer school work at Charlotetsville. 

Miss Martha Ferry, principal of one of the 
Batavia schools and the writer of this article 
were honored with the assignment to the work 
for a period of six weeks. Great interest was 



84 THE B ATA VI A SYSTEM 

manifested in the plan and its practical workings 
w-ith the seventy teachers who made up the 
classes for class instniction and individual 
work, and we left the University knowing that 
the future fruits of our work would reflect 
credit on the Bata\'ia schools as a source of a 
far reaching refonn. From this experience of 
15 years of indi\'idual instruction as a supple- 
ment and corrective to class teaching I am 
forced to regard it an imperative educational 
refonn. 



• ft 

% 



Chapter XIII 

Experience of Another Individual Teacher 

I have had eleven years experinece teaching 
in the Batavia schools under the Batavia sys- 
tem of Individual Instruction. Most of my 
teaching has been done in the fifth and sixth 
grades doing both class-teaching and individual 
instruction myself. During this time the pupils 
of these grades with the help of individual in- 
struction, have not only been able to make one 
grade in one year but some have gained two 
grades in one year, the bright as well as the 
slow child being helped. 

I have also taught three summers in the 
School of Observation in the University of 
Pennsylvania at Philadelphia, Pa., demon- 
strating the Batavia Individual Instruction 
System. My work was visited and observed 
by many superintendents, principals, teachers 

(8.5) 



86 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 



f 



and students from the various parts of the 
country who became so much interested that 
many requests were made for literature per- 
taining to the Batavia System and for daily 
programs of the work of all the grades. These 
were carefully studied and worked out in many 
of the schools it was afterward reported that 
the Batavia System had been adopted in their 

schools. 

Anna K Stein. 



Chapter XIV 

Views of a Neiv York Superintendent^^ 

To the Honorable, the Board of Education: 
Gentlemen: Your committee report: That 
•n the 13th and 14th inst they made an exhaus- 
tive investigation into the general plan and 
details of the methods of organization and in- 
struction as now carried out in the schools of 
Batavia, visiting every department in the central 
school building, from the lowest grade primary 
through the high school. 

By request of the other members of your 
'committee your Superintendent remained two 
full days, devoting three evenings to consulta- 
tion involving every phase of the work, with 
Superintendent Kennedy, visiting every school 
room in the seven school buildings of the town, 
observing minutely the plan of instruction in 



* Report of Barney Whitney to the Ogdensburg board of 
education 

(87) 



88 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

every grade of the schools, and interviewing at 
least thirty of the teachers. 

Your committee without reserve express 
their unqualified appreciation and approval of 
the organization and methods pursued. 

The entire absence of unrest, inattention, 
listlessness, or any form of disorder on the part 
of pupils; or of severity, reproof, or even refer- 

m 

ence to conduct or application on the part of 
the teachers, was a most agreeable surprise. 
No harshness, no reproaches or threats, no in- 
vidious comparisons, no sarcasm or reproachful 
remarks were observed nor would such treat- 
ment be tolerated. So manifest were these 
conditions that a representative of the Depart- v 
ment of Public Instruction, who had just closed 
his visit to these schools, commending upon the 
above, said to me on my arrival, "They have 
no discipline in these schools." What he meant 
was, it is the highest form of discipline. The 
scholarship, intelligence, self-reliance, discipline, 
cheerfulness, and devotion to wrok, surpassed 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 89 

anything we ever heretofore observed. We 
sought diligently for the causes which lead to 
such marked efficiency and are clear in our 
judgment that they are attributable, mainly, 
to the plan of organized individual instruction 
as the supplement and corrective of exclusive 
class instruction. 

The great defect of bur educational system 
is in making complete provision for the masses 
upon the false assumption of equality in the 
nature, conditions and environment of children; 
and its conspicuous failure to meet individual 
needs by a disregard of the fact that the nature, 
circumstances and environment of the children 
are as various as the children themselves. 

The remedy — the equity, the special means 
of relief, in our educational system — is to be 
found in organized individual instruction as the 
supplement and corrective of exclusive class 
instruction. . This is in the direction of the 
present movement of education viz: "Con- 
structive Individualism." 



90 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

The Batavia experiment is based upon the 
recognition of this principle. It assumes that 
every normal child can be brought forward even 
above the average, and be effectively educated. 
It assumes that the worry, discouragement, 
pressure and overstrain of teachers and pupils 
may be practically eliminated from the school 
room, and that nearly all can be promoted from 
grade to grade, and that the incentives or neces- 
sity for placing pupils beyond their grade rarely 
occur. It claims that their system of instruc- 
tion eradicates from the schools practically all 
the dull pupils, the stupid, the laggards, and 
that the bright pupils find it all they can do to 
keep in touch — to keep up — with the hereto- 
fore slow pupil. It was the purpose of your 
committee in their investigations to discover 
the truth in relation to these claims. 

The plan of instruction assumes two forms, 
or rather is applied under two different condi- 
tions. In over-crowded rooms an additional 
teacher is employed to do silent work — indi- 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 91 

vidual instruction — devoting her entire time to 
this form of work; while the teacher in charge 
devotes her entire time to class instruction. 
We found not the slightest confusion or inter- 
ruption of the two teachers in the same room. 
This plan is ideal and unquestionably produces, 
on the whole, a slightly higher degree of effi- 
ciency. It saves the division of pupils and 
providing an additional room; and a large num- 
ber of pupils can be easily and satisfactorily 
handled. There are six rooms thus supplied: 
In rooms in which there are not more pupils 
than one teacher can efficiently instruct, which 
includes all rooms except the six mentioned, the 
teacher gives both forms of instruction, devot- 
ing one-half the time to each, the periods of 
individual and class instruction in each subject 
alternating. 

This plan does in no way increase the teaching 
force or expense. It works admirably and gives 
excellent satisfaction. It secures vastly super- 
ior results in every phase and condition of school 



92 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

work to the old plan of exclusive class instruc- 
tion. 

Not the slightest embarrassment or friction 
attends this plan. Ample time is found for 
accomplishing all the work. Pupils, by means 
of individual instruction, rapidly acquire greater 
ability in class instruction. The teacher, also 
by the method pursued, acquires greater power 
in class instruction and accomplishes more in 
the lessened number of recitation periods than 
could be obtained under the plan of exclusive 
class instruction. 

The special business of the individual teacher 
is to find the weak spots in each individual pupil 
and make them the strong spots. It is marvel- 
ous what aptitude a slow, or so-called dull pupil, 
manifests when discouragement is removed and 
when once aroused to the consciousness of his 
or her ability ; and such pupils almost invariably 
assume a position among the strongest and most 
reliable pupils in the class. We searched for 
the slow and dull pupil, but failed to find one. 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 93 

We inquired for pupils who were at first slow of 
apprehension and apparently weak in the mas- 
tery of a subject. We had such thoroughly 
tested and were surprised at the clearness and 
mastery of the subject in hand. 

We had also pupils tested who were unusually 
apt upon entering the schools, that we might 
make a comparison in the work accomplished 
and ability to clearly comprehend the work in 
hand. We found little, if any, disparity in the 
two classes of pupils. Indeed the stronger and 
so-called bright pupils are more frequently found 
among the aroused pupils who at first were slow 
and possibly considered dull. It is the simplest 
plan or method possible. It does not disturb 
the organization of the school in the least; it 
requires only a slight modification of the pro- 
gramme. It is in harmony with the graded 
system. It is only slightly modified in its ap- 
plication. It is assumed that the best results 
can be secured in and through the graded system 
by a slight modification of it in its application. 



94 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

This plan of work is now and has been for 
nearly three years in complete operation in all 
the schools, primary, grammar and high school. 
The testimony of every teacher is, without the 
slightest hesitation or reservation, pronounced 
in favor of the present plan of organization and 
instruction. A proposition to abandon the 
present mode of instruction and return to the 
former plan would be met with the most em- 
pahtic protest from the teachers, pupils and 
patrons. 

The doctrine of ministration, personal service, 
has found its way into their schools. Too ex- 
clusive administration, regulating, dictating, 
has been the bane of our public schools. A new 
dispensation of service is dawning upon our 
educational system. 

The walls of every room in the grades are 
literally lined with written work embracing 
every subject of instruction in the respective 
grades. This work is of a higher order of ex- 
cellence than is to be found in any class of schools 
we have ever examined. 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 95 

We are fully prepared from an examination 
of the written work, the class exercises and tests 
given, together with the record in the high school 
to accept the united testimony of superintendent 
and teachers, that, with rare exceptions, all 
pupils can be moved simultaneously from grade 
to grade and that by their plan of instruction, 
semi-annual promotions and doubling of classes 
in a grade are unnecessary. 

The increased standings obtained in Regents' 
examinations in the high school the past year, 
i. e., the number who passed, the number re- 
ceiving honors and the number receiving 100 
in many of the advanced subjects were 50 per 
cent, higher than the year before. These 
results I took from the records of the institution. 
They are attributable directly to the influence 
of individual instruction. 

The plan is so simple that it can be introduced 
into any school room, and any conscientious, 
progressive, and intelligent teacher can secure 
incomparably better results than by the plan 
of exclusive class instruction. 



96 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

This plan of instruction, instead of producing 
dependence, as is sometimes erroneously suppos- 
ed, produces just the reverse. We have never 
seen more independent thinking and self-reliant 
pupils than in the Batavia schools. 

This experiment is attracting wide-spread 
attention. At the State Council of superin- 
tendents in New York state, last October, and 
at the recent National Superintendents' meeting 
in Chicago, at both of which Superintendent 
Kennedy was invited to present this matter, 
intense interest has been aroused. Dr. G. Stan- 
ley Hall, president of the Clark university said: 
"Individual instruction sounds the key-note of 
education for the next decade." 

State Superintendent Skinner has officially 
endorsed the plan. The Department of Public 
Instruction and Department of the Regents 
sent representatives to Batavia. They un- 
qualifiedly endorsed the plan. 

F. Thiselton Mark, Professor of Pedagogy, 
Birmingham, England, was sent to this country 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 97 

last year as a representative of the English 
government, to inspect certain phases of school 
work in our country. He examined with great 
care the organization and metjiods at Bataiva 
and gave them his emphatic endorsement and 
said: "These methods will revolutionize the 
schools of England." 

This method is now being introduced into the 
schools in the vicinity of Batavia, and other 
localities are arranging to introduce the same 
method. 

Your committee, therefore, unaimously re- 
commend the immediate introduction of indi- 
vidual instruction as the supplement and cor- 
rective of class instruction into such school rooms 
as can be under immediate personal supervision 
of the Superintendent with a view to its further 
introduction in the near future into all the public 
schools of the city. 



Chapter XV 

A. Philadelphia View* 

This is the story of what came from a crowded 
schoolroom in the pleasant town of Batavia, in 
western New York. Back of it is the rare com- 
mon sense of one thoughtful mind incorporate 
in a man by the name of John Kennedy. In 
front of it lies a well-nigh limitless sweep of 
possibilities, which, by a simple change in the 
present system of public education, may be 
productive of benefits beyond value to mankind. 

I call it the story of a crowded schoolroom 
because it was such that gave John Kennedy 
his opportunity to make a practical test of a 
theory he had evolved after many years of ex- 
perience as a teacher in public schools. 

He saw that education was not educating, 



*Leigh Hedges in the Philadelphia North American. The 
article begins with a quotation from Prof. O'Shea of the Uni- 
versity of Wisconsin. 

(98) 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 99 

but he didn't sit by and sigh because of this. 
He went to work with that one tool a man has 
which will carve destiny — his brain. And after 
he'd thought it all out, the chance came just as 
it always does. 

Opportunity is ever waiting around the corner 
for the man who uses his gray matter. 

In 1898 John Kenned}^ was superintendent 
of schools in Batavia. He is yet, despite offers 
of positions at increased salary. In November 
of that year — mark the date, for the time may 
come when the other events of that cycle, his- 
toric as they were, will sink into comparative 
insignificance beside this — a certain room in 
the public schools was overflowing with boys 
and girls. It was not actually crowded; indeed, 
it would have held more than were in it, but 
there were too many pupils for the one teacher. 

As the room space was large enough to ac- 
commodate more children, the superintendent 
resolved to suggest to the Board of Education 
a bold experiment in education. He advised 



too Till- H ATA VIA SYSTI:M 

tho board not to roinovo the c\ccii^ ot" chiUhvn. 
but to bring in a second toachor to bring for- 
ward tho laggards by means of individual in- 
struction. 

He argued that this wmild ht't the strain en- 
tirely froiu the class teacher and give her all 
the relief she needed: that it \vo\ild free the 
class work from all clogging and enable it to 
move freely, smoothly and steadily forward; 
that it would bring many unhappy children out 
of pitiful and dangerous distress; that it would 
remove worry fron\ both children and teacher, 
conducing to the health, happiness, coiitulence 
and ambition of all; that it would substitute 
complete success for failure, and that it would 
reduce the expense of carrying on schools. 

He told me the other day the members of that 
board at tirst looked at him as if doubtful for 
the moment of his sanity. 

Two teachers in one room! Who ever heard 
of ^uch a thing! And how in the world could 
such a simple innovation be productive of re- 
sults so radical and far-reaching! 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 101 

But they believed in the man standing before 
them, and they adopted his recommendation. 
Somehow the importance of the step they were 
authorizing seemed to be apparent to them, 
and after they had formally launched the new 
idea, and recovered from the effects of the shock 
the president said, "Gentlemen, this is not only 
a revelation, but a revolution." 

The names of the historic board who appoint- 
ed the first individual teacher in the history of 
education are D. W. Tomlinson, J. J. Wash- 
burn, John Holley Bradish, John M. McKenzie, 
Robert B. Pease and Hobart B. Cone. I think 
that not only the history of education but also 
the history of humanity, civil order and civil 
liberty will yet make appropriate record and 
graceful mention of the service of John Kennedy 
and these men. 

The woman they appointed was Miss Lucie 
Hamilton. vShe had been completely worn out 
by a life of teaching in public schools. When 
Professor Kennedy approached her with the 



102 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

proposition, she looked at him in amazement. 

"What do you mean?" she gasped. "Why, 
I'm a nervous and physical wreck from teach- 
ing!" 

"I mean that I want you to begin this work 
next Monday as a personal favor to me," he 
answered, "and to continue it after a month's 
trial as a personal favor to yourself!" 

So this Bat a via system — it is now known as 
that the world over — was to be of benefit to 
teachers as well as children. 

Miss Hamilton's instructions were, find the 
most backward children and make them the 
most forward. She has been doing this for 
nearly eight years now; she doesn't know she 
has such a thing as a nerve, and the system of 
which she was the first expositor has transf o^ned 
the schools in Batavia and become the foremost 
in the broad realm of education. 

She has proved beyond all question that 
whole grades can be lined up and moved for- 
ward without perceptible dragging and without 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 103 

any losses at all. She has proved that education 
can educate. She has proved that physical, 
intellectual and moral tragedy may be entirely 
eliminated from education, and that no one need 
look upon a schoolhouse with a shudder. 

When she enterfed upon her work the room 
contained fifty-four pupils. It has since con- 
tained as high as eighty-five, very much to the 
gratification of all concerned. And so well has 
she performed her assigned function that after 
she has found the most backward children it 
becomes impossible for other people to find 
them. 

Just what is this system which has so interest- 
ed the world as to bring to Batavia every week 
representatives of schools from various parts 
of the country and other countries as remote 
as the Argentine Republic and Japan? 

Briefly it is as follows: In schoolrooms with 
an enrolment of from fifty to eighty children 
two teachers are employed. One of these is 
the class teacher, who gives instruction to the 



104 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

classes, conducts the recitations, and is respon- 
sible for the maintenance of discipline, the 
keeping of records and the general machinery 
of the school. 

The other teacher in a way is co-ordinate 
with the class teacher, but she uses all her time 
in working at a desk with individual pupils who 
are found by the class teacher to be backward 
or who, for any reason, are failing to keep up 
their standing in the class. 

By this method the two teachers work as one ; 
they recognize that the w^ork of the school is a 
dual process, in which both teachers play an 
important part. The one supplements the 
work of the other; the work of recitation does 
not drag, while the child who is weak or needs 
assistance knows where and how to get it under 
the best and most helpful conditions. 

In schoolrooms with the usual number of 
pupils, from thirty to forty-five, the teacher 
divides her time, taking half for class and half 
for individual instruction. In this wav the 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 105 

plan works as well as with two teachers, and the 
efficiency of the school is materially increased 
instead of being lessened. 

The Batavia system assumes that a normal 
child is able to do the work of the school, pro- 
viding the school is carried on normally and 
under equitable conditions. It is based on two 
Don'ts: 1, don't tell the child anything, but see 
that he discovers it for himself; 2, don't do any- 
thing for him, but see that he does it for himself. 

It does away with putting the "square boy 
into the round hole and the round boy into the 
square hole." It maintains the grades of the 
school without inflexibility and gives all the 
advantages of the graded system without its 
grind and usual want of adjustability. 

The anaemic and neurasthenic child has a 
chance to go to school and get the education 
to which he is entitled without the draft on his 
body which prevents natural growth and with- 
out the nervous dread of failure to make promo- 
tion which bears so heavily on some children. 



106 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

The plan enables the school to do its best 
work in school hours. The home is relieved 
of the burden entailed by having to give the 
child additional instruction there! Under the 
Batavia plan the school prepares to meet the 
failures of the child in a rational and intelligent 
way: with the result that when the school day 
is over the child goes home to spend his time 
in recreation or other employment, confident 
that he can meet the demands of his school 
successfully on the morrow. 

This plan brings the school in touch with 
the child in a way not often realized through 
the ordinary method. The teacher discovers 
facts of temperament, environment and circum- 
stances affecting progress rarely if ever ascer- 
tained in the usual run of school life. The 
method invites confidence. The child comes 
to know the ground upon which he stands, and 
will respond to the efforts of the teacher to help 
him in a way visually wholly unexpected. 

"Since we introduced the Batavia system," 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 107 

said Professor Kennedy to me, "we are seeing 
our slow ones springing to the front and leading 
the companies. We are almost inclined to 
think that slowness of mind is an evidence 
prima facie of latent superiority. At any rate, 
we take the children just as they come to us 
from the hands of their Maker, and we make 
no invidious comparisons or distinctions. We 
say to all the children: 'Come let us climb.' 
And they climb; every one of them. We never, 
break a grade. 

"They have done such fine climbing since 
we introduced the system that they have flooded 
our high schools and all our upper grades. We 
are growing where we should grow — at the top. 
The increase in our first primar}^ grade this year 
is less than 2 per cent. The increase in all our 
grades, including the first primary, exceeds 10 
per cent. That is due to climbing and I can 
scarcely take you into any class that is not 
black with boys." 

The schoolrooms in which there are two 



108 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

teachers are just like those we have all been 
used to except that they have two teachers' 
desks instead of one. The whole system is 
founded on such a simple idea that one going 
through the Batavia schools and seeing what 
wonders have been wrought cannot keep back 
the question, "Why didn't some one think of it 
before?" 

In one room I visited, while the regular class 
teacher went on with her work, a boy of 1 1, with 
a strong suspicion of trouble on his face, walked 
to the desk of the individual teacher to be helped 
out of a difficulty. Under the ordinary system 
this lad would have been compelled to wait 
for assistance until the pending recitation was 
finished or possibly until the end of the day's 
session, when a tired teacher would have done 
her best to aid him. 

Now, however, there awaited him a sweet- 
faced woman who was there for the very purpose 
of giving him the lift he needed. And how did 
she do this? By speaking a few words of wis- 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 109 

dom? No. She asked him a question which 
brought a frown to his face. He couldn't 
answer it, so she asked him another, but with 
the same result. Then came a third and a 
fourth, but no more. The fourth had touched 
the magic spot and the boy's answer, accompan- 
ied by a smile that told the whole story, showed 
that it was all smooth sailing, at least for the 
present. 

The class had not been interrupted in the 
least ; the boy was unfettered and ready to keep 
step with his companions, and the second teach- 
er was ready for the next seeker. 

And it is not only in the schoolroom or in 
school work that this system is showing re- 
markable results. You see it on the streets 
of Batavia. When I first visited the place, and 
before I had ever heard of such a thing as its 
system of education, I was impressed with the 
general good behavior of the boys on the streets. 
There was such a lack of rowdyishness that I 
remarked upon the fact to a resident. 



no THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

"That's due to the Batavia system," he said. 

I had gone up there to report a heresy trial, 
but I remained to look into this notable innova- 
tion which has aptly been called by some one 
"Educational Christianity". 

Titusville and Hazel ton have adopted it 
officially. In many places in Ohio, Wisconsin, 
Illinois and other Western and Northern states, 
and in Canada it has proved as much of a suc- 
cess as in the town of its birth, and at present 
New York city is investigating it with a view to 
its adoption. 

And in the meantime John Kennedy is flooded 
with invitations to go here, there and the other 
place to introduce this plan of untold possi- 
bilities which has for its parents his brain and 
a crowded schoolroom, and may yet prove to 
be the panacea for many of our modern ills. 



Chapter XVI 

Views of a Michigan Superintendeitt* 

To the honorable Board of Education: 
Gentlemen — Something over a year ago, in 
connection with the matter of some overcrowded 
rooms, I brought to your notice the possibility 
of taking care of the rooms according to the 
so-called "Batavia Plan" of individual instruc- 
tion. At that time it was decided to be expe- 
dient to relieve the difficulty in another way. 
Since then several members of the board have 
expressed themselves as much interested in the 
plan. Therefore I took the opportunity, while 
visiting Batavia as a member of your special 
committee to examine a number of modern 
school buildings, to look very carefully into the 
workings of the Batavia plan. 



Report of Supt. E. D. Palmer to the West Bay City Board 
of Education 

(111) 



112 THE BAT AVI A SYSTEM 

The public school grew out of the principle 
that the citizens of a republic must be educated 
to be safe administrators of its affairs, while 
the graded form the schools have taken came 
from the necessity of furnishing progressive 
stages of educational work for the children of 
the schools, that many might be engaged on 
the same work at the same time under the direc- 
tions of the same teacher — a question chiefly 
of economy, of effort and of money. 

It was always known that children were not 
all alike in aptitude nor in capacity; but the 
most of them were enough alike in many ways 
to make gradation and a certain degree of uni- 
form progress possible. But because its ad- 
ministrators while they recognized and deplored 
saw no way to obviate it, the dift'erence in indi- 
vidual children — the genius and the slow child 
alike — was ignored in the system. While every 
teacher — every teacher with a heart — for a 
time struggles to save the child that is different, 
that has any originality of character, at length 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 113 

she succumbs to the current and is overborne, 
and with a heart full of anguish sees the children 
for whom she spends and is spent, drift out of 
teach, out of school, and out to sea. 

Nor have prominent educators been less con- 
cerned, but they found the condition existing 
when they began their work, they have sought 
diligently for a remedy, and in despair the most 
of them have settled down to the conviction 
that there is no cure, and content themselves 
with trying to render the suffering as tolerable 
as possible; while a few go further and affirm 
that some persons are foreordained to a mental 
damnation, as it has been believed some were 
to a moral. The consistent sequence of which 
is that the earlier the teacher discovers those 
predestined to mental death and precipitates 
the end, the better for the elect and the school 

« 

at large. 

Meantime some noble souls have clung to the 
idea that there are no dull pupils, if teachers 
were but wise enough to know how to reach 



114 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

them. Teachers have tried various expedients; 
detaining pupils after school to help them 
(which could hardly be separated in the child's 
mind from a benevolent sort of punishment), 
sparing a few minutes during the day to help 
some struggling one, setting aside a period in 
the programme for individual help, taking 
occasionally a class period for assisting children 
at their desks, assigning an advanced pupil to 
show younger ones, and so on. 

A few attempts at the solution of the problem 
of the backward pupil are more noteworthy 
than the rest. The German "blocking system" 
of alternating class and study-periods is an old 
one. The "pupil-teacher system" of England 
has attracted much attention, a kind of cadet 
system, in which pupils of the upper class regu- 
larly assist in the school work, receiving a small 
compensation. A plan tried at Hartford, Conn. , 
was to select the most backward of each room 
for a class and assign them to a separate teacher 
who would try to bring up the awkward squad 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 115 

so it could march with the rest of the company. 
At Providence, Rhode Island, the plan went 
farther and all backward pupils of a building 
were assembled in one room in charge of a teach- 
er who did what she could for them, thus al- 
lowing the brighter pupils to go unhampered. 
This might be called the "hospital-for-crippled 
minds plan". There must be a good deal of 
inspiration and soul-uplift for the children set 
aside in a room under those conditions! 

Then there is the Batavia plan. It is so 
radically different from the others, and the 
literature on the subject is so misleading, that 
a rather careful examination of its history and 
method is necessary, which is fully justified by 
the results it can show. The Batavia system 
is (like the graded school system as a whole) 
also an evolution. A little over five years ago 
a second and third grade room became over- 
crowded. It had been overcrowded before and 
had always been relieved in the usual ways, 
by forcing a few children in^o the next grade, or 



116 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

organizing a new room. The superintendent 
proposed to place a second teacher in the room, 
one teacher to take the classes and the other to 
help individuals. Thus the Batavia experiment 
began. 

The plan worked. When another room be- 
came overcrowded the same arrangement was 
made, until now the plan pervades the whole 
system of schools — that is to say, in six of about 
24 grade rooms two teachers carry on the alter- 
nation of class and individual instruction, while 
in the other 18 rooms there is a single teacher 
doing the same thing. Perhaps I should say, 
to prevent a misconception, that two teachers 
to a room is not an essential part of the Batavia 
plan. It can be operated just as well with one 
teacher, but with two teachers there is an econ- 
omy of expenditure for equipment, heating, 
etc., as it dispenses with an extra room. The 
two-teacher arrangement is the most conspic- 
uous thing to a superficial observer, and the 
word has gone out that the Batavia plan con- 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 117 

sists in putting two teachers in a room. I dare 
say that this very thing has put back its general 
adoption for five years. On the face of it two 
teachers to a room in most cities on a general 
scale is out of the question, and superintendents, 
understanding this to be essential, will not give 
the cause a hearing. As a matter of fact, when 
I went to examine the system I thought the 
general theory of individual instruction an 
ideal one, but was skeptical as to its applica- 
bility to a system like ours. I went to investi- 
gate upon the simple faith that "what man hath 
done, man can do." The first room I visited 
had but one teacher; I asked to see her pro- 
gramme; I watched her work; then the whole 
matter was clear. I saw one teacher at work 
with one grade, two teachers with one grade, 
two teachers with two grades, and one teacher 
with two grades, and I am convinced that a 
room that one teacher can handle with our 
present system can be handled with the Batavia 
system, with better results and with less demand 
both on the children and on the teacher. 



118 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

The central idea is a stated period for indi- 
vidual instruction to alternate with class work. 
The class work is necessary as a tonic ; the child 
needs it that he may measure himself by others ; 
he needs it for the audience it gives when he 
recites; and the teacher needs it as a means of 
determining results. The individual instructor 
is necessary for the child that can not yet ex- 
press himself intelligibly in class; for the child 
that has not learned how to study, or whose 
power of concentration has not been trained; 
for the child that is discouraged or diffident; 
for the child that is slow to catch a point and 
has not a ready answer in class. Some children 
come to the individual instructor for a single 
lesson; some come regularly for several days; 
some seldom or never come. Her time is for 
those who need it most. 

The relation between the two teachers in a 
room is interesting and vital. Neither is an as- 
sistant. They are co-ordinate in their work; 
but the responsibility of discipline and adminis- 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 119 

■ tration is lodged with one of them — sometimes 
with the class teacher, sometimes with the in- 
dividual teacher. 

When one teacher has one grade, her pro- 
gramme is arranged with alternate periods of 
classes and individual work. When two teach- 
ers have one grade it is divided into two sections 
doing the same work, and is operated in all 
respects like two grades ; one teacher does all the 
class work and the other all the individual work. 
The programme of the class teacher looks 
exactly like our programmes, with two sections 
in a room. The individual teacher simply 
does the work of the subject that recites next. 
With one teacher and two grade? the classes 
recite alternate days. 

As to results, let me summarize them: (1) 
There are no pupils that fail to pass. (2) 
Children of the grades do not have to take home 
books to study. (3) The teachers are happy 
and so are the children. (4) Absence from 
school has been greatly reduced. (5) The 



120 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

grammar grades are as full as the lower grades 
except for the difference in mortality. (6) 
Discipline nearly takes care of itself. (7) There 
is no scolding or sharp word for failure in class. 
(8) The work on all subjects in all grades is 
remarkably uniform, showing that there are no 
longer any backward pupils. (9) The high 
school has doubled in three years. 

There are a number of questions that are in- 
variably asked me by those with whom I have 
talked of this matter. Some of these I have 
answered above. Others are these: 

The business man asks: **How about the 
expense?" In Batavia they are saving $2,000 
a year by the plan. With one teacher in a 
room there would of course be no difference. 
With two teachers and 75 or 80 pupils in a room 
heating, janitor, etc. 

The teacher asks: "Does it not mean more 
work?" No, less. First, worry is gone, and 
worry kills more than work. If a pupil does 
not understand the work in hand, or is absent. 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 121 

the teacher does not worry, and the class time 
is not taken up with explanations that the others 
are not interested in. Then, since there is no 
time wasted in needless explanations, in the 
class, the teacher does not feel driven for time 
and can get more done with less friction. The 
same thing applies when the same teacher is 
alternately class teacher and individual in- 
structor, while at the same time the alternating 
work rests her. 

Another asks: "Are specially constructed 
buildings needed?" No, but if two teachers 
are to be employed the rooms should be a little 
larger. A new eight-room ward school nearly 
ready ^or service at Batavia, and the only one 
constructed with this system in view, has rooms 
26x35 feet, the same length and only a foot 
wider than in our Kolb school. These will be 
opened with one teacher in a room. If condi- 
tions require it, they are large enough for two 
teachers. 

"Is not the bright pupil overlooked in this 



122 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

plan?" No. He needs no individual help ex- 
cept at rare intervals, but the removal from 
his neck of the killing weight of the slow pupil 
allows him to go his gait. The old system kills 
the spirit of the ambitious, quick boy, who 
must barely creep to allow his slower brother 
to keep up, and so he dawdles along and becomes 
ruined as a student, for he has no incentive. 

"Does not individual instruction make the 
backward pupil dependent?" No. The in- 
structor has it in her hands to control that. The 
help she gives, or should give, is the help of 
teaching how to study. 

"Can the plan be used in the high school?" 
Yes. It has been in the Batavia high school 
for two years. 

"Can it be applied in West Bay City?" Yes. 
as well as anywhere, but it should be introduced 
gradually, as teachers catch its spirit and under- 
stand its methods. Our semi-annual promo- 
tions would need to be abandoned, which could 
not be done suddenly. 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 123 

"Are other cities adopting the plan?" Yes. 
Racine, Wisconsin, has just adopted it in full. 
Titusville, and Hazelton, Pa., Ashtabula, Ohio, 
Peterborough and Montreal, in Canada, Ogdens- 
biirg, N. Y., and other places are working under 
this plan. New York City and Buffalo are 
are taking the matter up, while educators 
everywhere are talking about it or going 
to investigate. I have here letters, reports, 
newspaper and magazine articles, all to the 
same effect, which I must not take the time to 
read to you, but which are at your service. 

In conclusion, gentlemen, I have the honor — 
and I esteem it highly — to recommend that the 
"Batavia plan" of individual instruction be 
adopted for the West Bay City schools, to be 
introduced gradually, as the way opens. Should 
this board approve the system, West Bay City 
will be the first city in Michigan to inaugurate 
it, and its operation here is sure to be watched 
with much interest. 



Chapter XVII. 

Testimony of a Batavia Principal* 

Many people have asked me to give testi- 
mony regarding the benefits of individual in- 
struction in public school teaching on the plans 
promulgated by Mr. Kennedy and as introduced 
by him into the Batavia schools. 

I have invariably stated that it is the only 
scientific and practical method of conducting 
the schools and it is due to this system that the 
Batavia schools take the rank to which by 
practical educators they are assigned. From 
my experience it is the only method which 
reduces the friction in school rooms, lessens 
the labor of the teachers, and promotes a higher 
average of scholarship in the grades. 

It has been my pleasure as well as my good 
fortune to have served under Mr. Kennedy at 



*From Martha Ferry, Principal of Washington Avenue 

School, Batavia 

(124) 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 125 

the very inception of this system and to have 
seen its growth until it has now become estab- 
lished and successful. I have taught in rooms 
with one teacher and with two teachers and 
have had good results under both conditions. 

I was much pleased to be one of two teachers 
who went to Charlottesville, Virginia, to demon- 
strate the system in the summer school at the 
University there ; and from letters received after 
my return I believe it was accepted with favor. 

As principal of one of the largest grade schools 
here I can bear testimony to the system's worth 
and value both to the pupils and to the teachers. 



Chapter XVIII 

An Indiana View* 

Sup't J. K. Beck of the city schools, who is 
always on the lookout for the best interests of 
the Bloomington schools, has made his report 
to the school trustees on the instruction system 
used in the Batavia (New York) schools. The 
school board after hearing the report has decided 
to adopt the system here, which is best explained 
in Mr. Beck's report which the World publishes 
in full. * * * 

''Resolution of the Board: 'It is hereby re- 
solved that this Board accepts the superinten- 
dent's report; heartily and unanimously en- 
dorses the Batavia plan; and orders its intro- 
duction into the eight elementary grades of the 
public schools as rapidly as possible.' 
William A. Rawles 

Secretary Board of Education 
Bloomington, Indiana. 

*From the Bloomington, Ind., Evening World 

(126) 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 127 

The adoption of the Batavia system called 
out from Walter Bradfute of the Bloomington 
Telephone the following comments. 

"It is not often a more interesting or impor- 
tant article appears in the Telephone than that 
of yesterday on the Batavia system to be intro- 
duced into the Bloomington schools, signed by 
Professor Rawles, secretary of our school board. 
If half promised is accomplished, it will be a 
lasting blessing — in these later days when going 
to school seems often a method of punishment 
more than to benefit the child. The absurd 
'high standing' theory has driven about half 
of our children out of the schools at the age 
when they should be there doing the most good. 
It should be made a crime, punished by the law, 
for any child in the lower grades to be compelled 
to study out of school hours. When only a 
small per cent, of all the children even get into 
the high school it's time somebody had the 
practical sense to ask the question — why? 
When less than 10 in 100 boys and girls go higher 



128 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

than the i:jadesi — is it the fault of the child or 
the system? 

"\Miat per cent, of our own boys are high 
school sraduates? Then whv? Little children 
carr\*ing home their books to study at night — 
afraid of 'red marks' — it's too absurd to think 
about. 

"The new system that our school board pro- 
poses to introduce has every mark of common 
sense, and it looks like it was formulated by 
somebody who thought more of the child and 
its wehare than 'higher education' and the fads 
that land 99 out of 100 outside the college walls. 

"So we say that in introducing this new school 
system of only common sense. Prof. Beck and 
otir school board will have the thanks and ap- 
preciation of. parents generally in this commu- 
nitv. 



Chapter XIX 
A Wisconsin Adoption 

The schools of Racine, Wis., have themselves 
become a model to be studied by educators on 
account of the adoption of the "Batavia Sys- 
tem," as will be seen by the following excerpt 
from a recent issue of the Racine Xews: 

"For years the schools of Racine have been 
a source of pride to the residents of the beautiful 
Belle City of the lakes, but of later years this 
pride has become more marked, and justly so. 
Whenever anything new is brought up in educa- 
tional circles it catches the eye of the local 
public school officials and if they find it to be 
possessed of merit it is adopted without delay. 
One example of this is the individual system of 
instruction adopted here some time ago, and it 
has proven most gratifyingly successful. This 
system was in vogue in Batavia, N. Y., and the 

(129) 



130 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

school commissioners desiring to have a thorough 
investigation made into its merits appointed a 
committee of competent educators, to make a 
trip of inspection through the schools of the 
eastern city. Their report was a favorable 
one and the consequence was that the system 
was introduced here. Since that time educators 
from other cities have been here to inspect this 
method of instruction and men prominently 
identified with the school work in Racine have 
made speeches on the subject in other cities." 



Chapter XX 

A Revelation and a Revolution* 

"This is not only a revelation but a revolu- 
tion." 

These were the words of President Daniel 
W. Tomlinson of the Batavia Board of Educa- 
tion, spoken one November evening in 1898 
when Professor John Kennedy closed the first ex- 
position that he ever made of the principles of 
Individual Instruction. Those present were, 
besides President Tomlinson, J. J. Washburn, 
Robert B. Pease, John Holley Bradish, John 
M. McKenzie and Herbert B. Cone, together 
with P. P. Bradish who was clerk of the Board. 

It was a strange and unprecedented sugges- 
tion that Professor Kennedy had made. In 
the central school building there was an over- 
crowded room, causing work too great for the 



*Chester E. Piatt, editor Batavia Evening Times 

(131) 



132 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

teacher. The method of the past had been in 
such cases to divide the room and provide an- 
other teacher. The conviction came to Pro- 
fessor Kennedy that another room was not 
needed. 

For many years he had been studying the 
problems of education. He had known the 
evils of class instruction. He had seen teachers 
break down under the strain of trying to keep 
the backward children spurred up so that they 
might not impede the progress of the whole 
class. He had seen the backward children made 
sullen and discouraged by class instruction 
methods not adapted to their needs. He out- 
lined to the Board a remedy for these evils. 
He suggested a second teacher for the room, a 
teacher whose duty should be to bring the back- 
ward children forward. His earnest words 
carried conviction. The Board was profoundly 
impressed, and saw a vision of the future which 
caused President Tomlinson to say "This is 
not only a revelation but a revolution." 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 133 

Although it was an experiment without 
precedent the Board without hesitation unani- 
mously passed a resolution providing that a 
teacher should be engaged for Individual In- 
struction, as recommended by Professor Ken- 
nedy, and the Batavia System, now known 
around the world, was inaugurated. 

The Professor was asked to recommend a 
teacher for the work. He recommended Miss 
Lucie Hamilton. She was ill at the time, suf- 
fering from a nervous breakdown, the result 
of overwork as a teacher struggling with the 
difficulties inseparable from the old-time system 
of class instruction. A member if the Board 
reminded Professor Kennedy of this, but he 
declared that Miss Hamilton was just the teach- 
er that he wished for the position, and that he 
believed that she would be available, and she 
was. 

But it was not without some hesitation on 
her part, and positive assurances of success on 
Professor Kennedy's part, that Miss Hamilton 



134 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

became the first individual teacher in the pubHc 
schools of this country, a position in which she 
has won well deserved distinction. 

Foreseeing possible dangers in connection 
with the work of the individual teacher, and 
foreseeing possible misapprehensions that might 
call out criticisms. Professor Kennedy laid 
down three paradoxical Dont's. 

"First, Don't tell a child anything, but see 
that he knows it. 

"Second, Don't do anything for the child, 
but see that it is done. 

"Third, Don't do anything on a lesson that 
has not been recited." 

The object of these don'ts was to guard 
against the danger of doing work for pupils, 
instead of teaching them how to do if got them- 
sleves. It was not intended jthat the individual 
teacher should be a mere coach to assist scholars 
in preparing their lessons. The aim of indi- 
vidual instruction is to help the child .of slow 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 135 

mental power to acquire the power of indepen- 
dent study. 

In the realm of business Frederick W. Taylor 
has started a revolution by his exposition of the 
principles of scientific management, applied 
to manufacturing establishments. All can ap- 
preciate the waste of material things which our 
national policy of conservation aims to correct. 
Not so many appreciate the still larger waste 
of human effort going on in connection with 
all our manufacturing establishments, although 
the daily loss is greater from this sovirce than 
from the waste of material things. 

In the educational world John Kennedy of 
Batavia started a revolution twelve years ago, 
by calling attention to the great loss which we 
suffer through the inefficiency of the teaching 
in our public schools. To correct the necessary 
evils of class instruction and to increase the 
general efficiency of school work the Batavia 
system of Individual Instruction was devised. 
At the outset Professor Kennedy declared that 



130 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

Individual Instruction would never be the 
prime method of education, nor even the normal 
fomi of teaching. He said that children must 
be assembled in classes, and drilled, trained and 
educated in the presence of their fellows. 

Thus only can they get the needed spur of 
competition. But Professor Kennedy also 
pointed out that the best results cannot be 
accomplished by class instruction alone. Many 
pupils do not grasp principles readily from a 
presentation that may be best adapted for the 
entire class. In every class there are those who 
lag behind others, and classes are held back 
from making proper progress on account of the 
slow pupils. But less than one per-cent of these 
slow pupils are mental defectives, who cannot 
master the subject which the class is studying. 
A considerable proportion have some physical 
defect which the teacher of the class would 
perhaps never discover, but which the individual 
teacher finds out at once and can often take 
steps to remed}'. Very often children are found 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 137 

to be suffering from defective sight or hearing, 
anaemia, malnutrition, or the presence of ade- 
noids or other abnormal growths. 

But the most important thing disclosed by 
the Batavia system is, that children apparently 
defective are often those whose minds are better 
than the average, and who for this reason re- 
quire a different and peculiar development, 
which only individual instruction can give. 
Some children have highly developed brains 
which make extraordinary demand upon the 
blood supply and upon the nervous system 
which makes them seem incompetent, when in 
reality they are superior. 

Sir Isaac Newton's own mother declared he 
had no capacity to fix his mind upon sensible 
things. In ordinary schools he would have 
been at the foot of the class, a drag upon the 
other children and a source of irritation to his 
teacher. But in the Batavia schools, or in 
other schools which have adopted the Batavia 
system his genius would have been detected. 



138 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

Precocious ability is no sure sign of greatness, 
and brains that seem to show up very badly 
in extreme youth often turn out to be the best. 



Chapter XXI 

The Present View in Batavia* 

Every one at all conversant with the public 
graded schools of the last quarter century has 
seen, if he has given half attention to his sur- 
roundings, the individual effort of the old-time 
school overwhelmed and submerged in the 
ever-increasing complication of the modern 
curriculum. Children have been poured, as 
wheat into the hopper, into its capacious maw, 
with the intention of bringing forth from its 
millstones a level and satisfactory product. 
Those who possessed the requisite qualities did 
come forth, in the end, men and women of 
worth. But what of waste ever attended the 
process! The final product bore no relation 
in numbers to the raw material furnished at the 



*From Sup't E. A. Ladd, formerly principal of the Batavia 
high school 

(139) 



140 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

start. Hundreds, yes thousands were tossed 
out of its machinery upon the waste-heap, and 
every succeeding 3'ear has seen its machinery 
become more intricate, its waste more enor- 
mous. 

Individual Instruction strives to save those 
who are thus rejected, aims to save the one 
and all. It hastens to put arms of love and 
sympathy about those who, by any means 
mav be less fortunate than their fellows. It 
recognizes the fact, too often overlooked, that 
the progress of the mass must be measured not 
by its fore-runners but by those who mark the 
rear. It maintains that each and every child 
is endowed with an inherent and inalienable 
right to receive a share in the kingdom of knowl- 
edge. Upon these three great ideas individual 
instruction bases its thesis. 

The application of individual instruction is 
simple. The day-after-day recitation is super- 
seded by class-recitation alternating with in- 
dividual recitation. This division of time forms 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 141 

the sine qua non of its successful use, whether 
the grade be large or small, or conducted by 
one or two teachers. It is also essential that 
the consecutive recitations of the daily pro- 
gram should also alternate between the two 
forms of recitation. In the purely class-recita- 
tion form of instruction, where the pupils recite 
turn and turn about, success in work for all can 
be obtained only when all the pupils are equally 
endowed with mental capaVjility, live in similar 
environments, and undergo like accidents in 
life. Such a situation is manifestly impossible. 
There must of necessity be found in any group 
of children some whose mental gifts are fewer, 
whose surroundings are less desiraVjle, whose 
ancestry fs more tainted with weakness, whose 
life influences are on a lower plane than those 
of others. When mass methods as exemplified 
in pure class instruction are applied to such 
heterogeneity, waste must inevitaVjly ensue. 
Those well-equipped with favorable qualities 
will forge ahead; those, lacking these qualities, 



142 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

some or all. will gravitate to the rear; while all 
the way between the two extremes will be found 
others whose capacities reach various degrees 
of perfection. The teacher, endowed as are 
most human beings with human frailties, is 
apt, after more or less of effort, to abandon 
many of those who are behind the line of 
average to their fate and devote her attention 
to such as she often styles the deserving, 
though in reality she is following the line of 
least resistance, a habit that has caused nine- 
tenths of the trouble in teaching. The neglected 
ones, after periods of school life of various 
lengths, withdraw from fruitless endeavor to 
learn, and enter the army of those who toil 
below the dead line of recompense. Their 
departure is witnessed often by the teacher with 
a sense of relief. It is so easy to blame their 
failure upon natural dullness, family need of 
the money they may earn, industrial demand 
for their services: upon an^'thing in short save 
the real and true reason, the failure of the 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 143 

teacher to teach. When the final reckoning is 
cast in such classes there is gratulation and joy 
on the teacher's part if even a tithe of the child- 
ren can be reported as successful. 

The teacher who uses the individual form of 
instruction feels keenly for those who are not 
present at this final roll-call. She is filled with 
a mighty yearning to count every one intrusted 
to her care among the jewels of her crown. 
When comes the day for individual work, she 
calls the child who is stumbling or who has been 
retarded by illness or other circumstance to her 
side. Seated there at the desk, in comparative 
seclusion, she clears away the trouble that 
unless removed may ruin the child's educational 
career for good and all. However, she tells 
nothing of this work, but by tactful and judi- 
cious questioning leads the pupil to master his 
work. A double gain results. The child is 
advanced in his work, while the rest of the class 
are busily engaged along the recitation forms in 
the preparation for advanced work. When, 



144 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

next day, they are all called to class recitation, 
matters move smoothly. That waste of time 
that always occurs when the backward pupil, 
at the board or in recitation, flounders helplessly 
about, is avoided. The other members of the 
class, instead of sitting by as amused specta- 
tors, are all busy. They have no chance to sit 
in idleness tmtil the exasperated teacher says 
curtly that the painful exhibition shall end 
and the work be taken up by another. In a 
class individually instructed there is no noise 
louder than the low question and answer of the 
two at the desk. All others may study, with 
nothing to divert attention. It follows from 
this way of conducting recitation, that the class 
loses no time because of omitted class periods 
but rather accomplishes more than can be 
accomplished by the pure class-hearing method. 
The teacher using Individual Instruction 
will not find it necessary to call to her desk, 
day after day, the same pupils. When she has 
led her dull boy to the mastery of one problem, 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 145 

she has given him strength that will enable him 
to grapple successfully with the next. Thus 
gaining mental power from time to time, the 
backward child soon becomes the average child 
and often the leading child. When this de- 
sirable condition has been wrought, another 
takes his place at the table. This constant 
application of attention and interest to those 
composing the rear division of the class results 
finally in bringing the whole body into one 
straight line, able triumphantly to advance to 
the attempting of other tasks, because all are 
conscious of the power to do. 

Individual Instruction is a boon to the back- 
ward child. It aids the bright and intelligent 
as well. Errors in mental processes and mis- 
takes in the writing of exercises are kept from 
their sight. In the usual class form of recita- 
tion, these errors and their correction consume 
a large part of the time, time that in individual 
instruction is available to all pupils not at the 
desk for quiet and uninterrupted work. To 



146 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

see every pupil at work, and making use of every 
minute, is an inspiration. These busy pupils 
see little or no public exhibition of errors in 
individual instruction. Those, if they occur, 
are corrected quietly at the desk. Incorrect 
sentences in language work, or faulty methods 
in solution of problems surely work harm to 
all pupils who observe them, even though those 
pupils are fully able to think in the right way. 
Thus it can be clearly seen that a class in indi- 
vidual instruction is protected from the dam- 
aging influence of incorrect work to a large 
degree. It has also the advantage of the 
esprit du corps that is to be brought about only 
when every individual in a company knows 
that all others are swinging forward, bent upon 
the same goal, that satisfaction that arises 
when a regiment of soldiers arrives upon the 
field of battle with no stragglers lagging along 
the line of march. Every place is filled. All 
stand shoulder to shoulder, proud of their fel- 
lows' achievements, and sure in their support. 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 147 

Individual instruction goes a long way to- 
ward solving the proh)lem of discipline. The 
child who is not interested in school work, turns 
his activities in the direction of mischief. This 
lack of interest is unnatural, for the normal 
child is eager to work in school if he can at all 
times see the profitable results in that work. 
In the crowded school-room, it is very easy for 
him, either through inability to grasp principles 
as readily as his fellows, or through the failure 
of his teacher to recognize the instant of his 
wavering, to fall behind the average. One link 
in his development lost, his whole chain of pro- 
gress is of no avail. He becomes hopelessly 
involved in a tangle of facts. As soon as he 
sees that he has lost his relative rank in his class, 
he naturally becomes discouraged and dis- 
orderly, thus giving rise to a vexing problem, 
for he cannot be removed from school until he 
reaches the age limit or passes the maximum 
test provided by law. Had his difficulty been 
overcome when first he encountered it, his 



148 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

educational development would have received 
no check. He would have gone on from grade 
to grade and perhaps even finished high school. 
As long as he achieved success in his school 
tasks, he would have continued his effort, and 
maintained good deportment, for busy brains 
find little time for pranks. Individual Instruc- 
tion thus accomplishes two great resvilts: the 
children remain in school, thereby greatly les- 
sening the percentage of withdrawal, while 
discipline is reduced to the minimum and in 
many cases its need is entirely eradicated. 

No less important than any of the results 
so far mentioned, is the beneficial influence that 
Individual Instruction exerts upon the teacher 
herself. By this is meant not only the physical 
advantage to be derived from relief from con- 
stant efforts in the conducting of classes, but 
also the complete revolution that it works in 
her conception of the duties of the office she 
fills. It needs no demonstration to show that 
the teacher must receive bodilv rest from the 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 149 

individual period. She will also be able to 
conduct the next class period with less strain, 
for much of the vexatious delay and irritating 
complications connected usually with it has 
been avoided by having all of the pupils levelled 
up through the individual training of the slow 
and the dull. She will, again, be enabled better 
to understand each child that she invites to her 
desk, the directly personal and, as one might 
say, frankly confidential relations thus estab- 
lished. Individual Instruction thus reaches 
out and embraces child study, giving the teach- 
er a powerful lever with which to execute her 
work. Yet all of this is of minor importance, 
when the retroactive influences that the Indi- 
vidual Instruction exerts upon the teacher are 
considered. When the teacher comes to see 
that every backward child can be redeemed 
and set upon the high road of education, she 
will be filled with the magnitude of her calling. 
Instead of rejoicing when the dull child leaves 
school, she will be satisfied only when that leak 



150 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

has been stopped by bringing every pupil to 
the successful end of work. She will not re- 
gard children as natural foes, to be endured 
for a season and then dismissed with thankful- 
ness. She will rather see in all of them oppor- 
tunities for the exercise of love and sympathy. 
Her vocation will become to her a joy, measured 
not by the stipend she receives, but by the possi- 
bilities it offers for the uplift of individuals, and, 
through them, the uplift of the human race. 
Individual Instruction carried to its logical 
conclusion means a new race of teachers, men 
and women whose hearts will be filled with a 
mighty love for children, who will not be con- 
tent until every straying, lagging child is safely 
brought into the fold of education. The whole 
system as conceived by its able and far-seeing 
originator, is based upon that sublime utterance 
of the Greatest of all Teachers, "Suffer little 
children to come unto me and forbid them not." 



Chapter XXII 

Elimination of the Ninth Grade* 

Last spring Superintendent Belknap of the 
Lockport schools visited Batavia to investigate 
individual instruction. Soon afterwards M. A. 
Federspeil, a member of the Board of Education 
of Lockport, also made an investigation here. 
Both were so favorably impressed with the 
Batavia system that Superintendent Belknap 
returned and brought with him the principal 
of the Lockport high school and several teachers 
who spent the day visiting our schools. As a 
result the Batavia system has been adopted by 
Lockport and an article in regard to the matter 
appeared in the Lockport Union-Sun which in 
part was as follows: 

:}: :|c H: * * 

The Board of Education last night adopted 



*From the Batavia Sunday Times 

(151) 



152 THE B ATA VI A SYSTEM 

a report of the committee on teachers, text books 
and schools, recommending the installation of 
the Batavia plan of instruction in the local public 
schools at the beginning of the school year in 
September. This method provides for definite 
and specific class and individual teaching, one- 
half of the school session being devoted to each. 

This system was highly recommended by 
Trustee M. A. Federspeil, chairman of the 
committee, who presented the report urging its 
adoption, and also by Sup't of Schools Emmet 
Belknap, both of whom visited the schools of 
Batavia on several occasions and witnessed a 
practical demonstration of the teaching in vogue 
in that city. Sup't Belknap on one of his visits 
was accompanied by a number of the local 
teachers, who were much interested in the work 
performed there. 

Trustee Federspeil claimed that changing 
from the method now in use here to that prac- 
ticed at Batavia involved considerable altera- 
tion in instruction. He believed that by it 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 153 

however, students would accomplish more than 
under the present plan, the Batavia plan seemed 
to draw more out of each than is possible under 
the system here. 

He thought that the new plan would meet 
with the disapproval of the older teachers here, 
but the younger teachers, he imagined, would 
adapt themselves to it more readily. Its sim- 
pleness in reaching the dull and backward stu- 
dent commended it most highly, as it enabled 
the pupils to get through their school work much 
earlier than is possible in this city. 

President Earl, Trustees Griggs, Whitmore 
and others believed the introduction of the new 
system in the local schools would be a step in 
the right direction. The committee's report 
was then unanimously adopted. 

Sup't Belknap next presented a report re- 
garding the elimination of the ninth year in the 
grade schools and also recommending the Bata- 
via plan, which was adopted. His report was 
as follows : 



154 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

In making plans for the elimination of the 
ninth year of elementary school course, as di- 
rected by you, I have previously suggested and 
you have authorized the semi-annual classifica- 
tion and promotion of pupils. Since that time, 
I have had occasion to reflect upon the fact 
that such classification and advancement will 
be more difficult here than in cities in which the 
school buildings are larger so as to contain all 
elementary grades and permit frequent re- 
classification in the same school and building 
than in our case, where we have no building 
instructing all elementary grades, so that pupils 
have to change schools twice or three times 
before reaching the Union school building. 

I have had all through this year — as in pre- 
vious years — very frequent occasion to reflect 
upon the difficulty of so grading pupils in classes 
not too difficult for teachers, to observe the 
necessity of much individual teaching, and to 
provide for it by all sorts of temporary expe- 
dients and by employing extra assistants where 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 155 

classes were large or teachers not in health, in 
order to prevent pupils falling behind their 
respective grades and classes. Unless this is 
done, pupils who have reached the age of legal 
employment are much less inclined to remain 
at school, and to leave as early as they can do so. 
An increased number of such leave school each 
year. I have issued 105 school records for 
pupils leaving school under sixteen years of age 
since the schools opened last September, and 
others have withdrawn who did not take out 
employment papers. 

I have come to feel that of more importance 
than semi-annual classification and advance- 
ment, is that the necessity of definite and sys- 
tematic individual teaching by the regular 
teachers should be recognized and definitely 
provided for. I have made a careful study by 
observation and comparison of the results ob- 
tained under such provision in the schools of 
Batavia, where such plan and provision have 
been consistently pursued during a period of 



156 THE BAT AVI A SYSTEM 

14 years past, and have come to the conclusion 
that it is my duty to call attention to it, and to 
recommend that a similar system be authorized 
and provided in our schools. By the simple 
provision there that all teachers devote one- 
half of the time of instruction to classes and the 
other half to individual teaching, giving the 
individual teaching to all children, so that those 
more capable may be advanced more rapidly 
and those less capable move forward as rapidly 
as their ability under personal attention will 
permit, they are accomplishing all that we seek 
to accomplish by the elimination of the ninth 
year, are holding their pupils longer in school, 
and their grammar and high school registration 
is largely increased and increasing, while ours 
is lessening. I find that it is done without 
strain and worry of either pupils or teachers, 
that their teachers are less frequently absent 
because of illness due to overwork, that more 
of the work is accomplished in the regular school 
hours, and that less work and study has to be 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 157 

done by either teachers or pupils at home. 

Individual instruction is continually neces- 
sary. It is unavoidable if pupils are to be en- 
abled to learn and to progress in their classes 
as they should do, and we have been doing it 
in an unscientific, spasmodic and uneconomical 
way by taking valuable time in class recitation 
periods to try to have pupils recite and perform 
what they do not know sufficiently and by fre- 
quent and sometimes long detentions after 
school. The worst of it is that in many cases 
it is thus done ineffectually, and that in other 
cases where it was most needed and due the 
pupil, it has not been done at all. 

By the Batavia plan pupils gain from 1-4 to 
1 -3 of time for study in school ; the teacher knows 
much better the real mental condition of every 
child under her instruction, more is accomplish- 
ed in fewer recitations, detentions after school 
to make up work are brief and less frequent, 
less study has to be done out of school hours, 
teachers do not have to spend so many hours 



158 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

looking over and marking test and lesson exer- 
cises at home in the evening, q,nd the spirit and 
health of pupils and teachers are conserved. I 
could not help noticing the cordial and spon- 
taneous fine spirit of teachers and pupils in their 
school work there. 

In three separate visits in many school rooms 
of all the grades I always found pupils busily 
and happily at work, no inclination to be indo- 
lent, mischievous or to waste time or to be in any 
way disorderly. I do not recall seeing or hearing 
any teacher have to chide or correct a child for 
disorder or disobedience. The atmosphere and 
the spirit of all rooms breathed freedom, happi- 
ness, pride in their work, and the expectation 
and consciousness of success was uniformly 
manifest. This because all were doing what 
they needed to do and were capable of doing, 
because the teacher was intelligently conscious 
of the condition of each child, and by personal 
attention making his or her ultimate success 
a reasonable certainty. 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 159 

Discipline is good and natural there, and I 
understand that punishment by the rod or by- 
harsh measure has been avoided there for years. 

The individual plan in connection with class 
instruction does not increase the cost of instruc- 
tion, and it is not accomplished by greater work 
or strain on the part of teachers. In rooms of 
ordinary size classes one teacher does all of the 
work of instruction, except that done by special 
teachers of drawing, music, etc. ; but if the class 
is excessive in size, 50 or more, two teachers are 
placed in the room — one to do individual, the 
other class work, though they are privileged to 
interchange and combine their work as desired 
under approval of the superintendent. 

Their classification and promotion of classes 
are yearly, but by their system individual pro- 
motions or demotions, which are sometimes 
advisable, are easily and freely made at any 
time, pupils gaining grades by making the work, 
not by skipping it. I would adopt the essential 
features of the system and believe that on 



160 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

proper trial it would greatly commend itself to 
all concerned, parents, pupils and teachers, 
and that the scholarship of our schools would 
not be lessened but much strengthened in 
general. 

In all my examination of pupils who have 
been reported to me as deficient and not suc- 
ceeding with their work and unable to accom- 
plish the work of the grade in which they had 
been placed, I found that, unless it was a case 
of intellectual deficiency or physical disability, 
individual teaching was the one and only rem- 
edy, and that if it had been intelligently applied, 
and persevered in the condition would not have 
arisen. It is due to every child, and I do not 
think any school system has a right to disregard 
it or to fail to provide definitely for it. Teachers 
who have for a long time been accustomed to 
the old way of teaching may, at the beginning, 
be apprehensive that it means increased labor 
and strain for them, but I am confident that 
when they see how it improves the work of their 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 161 

pupils and increases their aspiration for work 
and progress, and that it removes much of the 
strain and emancipates them from much that 
has to be drugery under the former plan of 
teaching, they will be grateful and thankful for 
it and co-operate cheerfully and intelligently. 
It means good, discriminating teaching that 
accomplishes results, because rightly applied, 
and does not have to be done over and over 
again in order to accomplish a minimum of 
result. 



Chapter XXIII 

Strengthening the Graded System* 

In response to your request for a special report 
on the present status of the Batavia plan in 
Batavia and the observed results of its use, I 
beg leave to submit the following: 

The plan is in full operation here, and is well 
started on its fourteenth year of use. It may 
therefore be said to have stood the test of time. 

Its popularity at the outstart was instantan- 
eous. The people understood it at once, and 
applauded it. At present I see no abatement 
of its popularity. 

I think that I have observed many and 
varied results springing from the use of this plan. 
Some of those results have been surprising and 
all have been gratifying. I cannot hope to go 
into them all, but will mention some. 



*A report made b}^ request of the School of Pedagogy of 
Chicago University 

(162) 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 163 

When a crowd are assembled it is either up- 
lift or crush for the individual. We think that 
our plan has secured the inspiration and warded 
off the danger. 

Where there is inequality of condition the 
crowd becomes a tangled mass. The attempt 
to move a tangled mass is overstrain. Under 
our plan we think there is no strain. Our 
teachers we think are becoming more vigor- 
ous from year to year. 

Worry of any kind has its goal in break-down, 
if not in death. And few people are aware how 
contagious a thing nervous debility is. Nerves 
are responsive to nerves. We think that worry 
has been eliminated here, and that our children 
are calm, composed, safe, and vigorous. 

Sanitation should be the first care of school 
management. Under our plan I think that 
our schools have become not only sanitary but 
salubrious. That is I think that schools prop- 
erly individualled become conducive to the re- 
covery of impaired or lost health. 



164 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

Interested occupation is preoccupation, and 
all know that preoccupation in good things is 
the best safe-guard against the approach of evil 
things. I think that our plan tends toward 
absorbed preoccupation in the good work of 
getting an education. This is not only a nega- 
tive safe-guard, but it is also a positive promo- 
tive of character by supplying high aims. 

I have implied already that our order and 
discipline have greatly improved. They have 
greatly improved; and it is the right kind of 
order; it is the order that not only permits busi- 
ness to proceed ; it is the order that is an atmos- 
phere that novtrishes the growth of character. 
Where energy is expended in securing a sem- 
blance of order, the same energy must be em- 
ployed in maintaining it. There is tension that 
is depleting and depressing all around. 

Our individual teaching has enabled us to 
move oiir grades. They do not now sink down 
by their own weight. Our children all move 
forward and arrive on time. The quick one no 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 165 

longer marks time ; he sets the pace for the rest 
of them; and the rest line up on him. There is 
no longer any retardation. There is no longer 
any necessity for skipping grades in order to 
get on. We always allow an individual to gain 
a grade where it is to his advantage to do so. 
The gainer of a grade needs individual attention ; 
and under our plan he gets it. Let no one sup- 
pose that the individualling is done only with 
children of questionable capacity. There are 
numerous circumstances that send our brightest 
pupils at times to the individual table. 

It is here that we get the benefit of schooling. 
The child's first incentive is to line up with his 
fellows. He works first for his line; then he 
works because of enjoyment in his work, and at 
last he works for grand remote aims. When 
his acquisitive powers are trained, and when he 
can see the goal of life, he may then work out 
his own salvation in the solitude of home. 

The school classes and grades should move 
forward in lines dressed at right-angles to the 
line of advancement. 



166 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

No child has been promoted here as a favor; 
no child has been promoted here to get him out 
of the way, Every child here has been pro- 
moted because he has shown under severe test 
that he was ready for promotion. Under 
separate cover I send you transcripts of the 
promotion examinations records. These records 
are kept on file at the office of the Board of 
Education for the inspection of all. Any in- 
vestigator will find there the school record of 
every child for a series of years. 

You will observe that every child has passed 
the minimum; that nearly all of them have a 
comfortable margin beyond the minimum; and 
that most of them are hovering around the 
maximum. We could not get any such results 
until we resorted to individualling. We would 
not have thought such results credible. 

It may perhaps strengthen confidence in the 
integrity and searchingness of the examination 
to say that the questions for all above the fourth 
grade come from Albany, and that the examina- 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 167 

tions are conducted under regulations fixed by 
the state department. I have many reasons 
for favoring a strong state department; and not 
the least is that they make statistics of some 
value. 

One conspicuous result of our individual 
teaching is that it has enabled us to keep our 
grades intd;ct. There is not an ungraded school 
nor an ungraded room in this town, nor is there 
a grade section. Grade section seems to me 
the first step towards grade dissection; in other 
words the first step toward the ungraded school. 
Perhaps the ungraded school is needed but I 
do not think so. I do not think that we need 
to go back sixty years. The people of sixty 
years ago were not contented; they struggled 
for progress, and to some purpose; they gave us 
the graded school. And I think that they gave 
a great contribution. 

Since we have been attending to the indi- 
vidual we have seen no necessity for disturbing 
our annual intervals and annual promotions. 



168 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

I think that there is an advantage in having the 

elementary grades conform to the practice that 

is universal in the secondary schools, colleges, 

and universities. The grading of the elementary 

schools was but an extension downward of the 

organization that proved so satisfactory in 

higher education. We think that it obviates 

much confusion, and that it is better in every 

way, to have a third year child, for example, 

mean one thing, and not two things. There is 

something gained, I think, by symmetry and 

clearness. Furthermore where the purpose is 

integration rather than disintegration I think 

that a semi-annual promotion is premature. 

We need the full year, and the children need 

the full year, in order to reach the best results. 

A very noticeable result of our plan has been 

the remarkable expansion of our upper grades 

and high school. In a total enrollment of 1750 

there are over 850 in the upper seven of the 

twelve grades. In a total enrollment of 1750 

there are 375 in the high school and 125 in the 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 169 

8th grade. Those 8th grade pupils are practi- 
cally high school students as they are all study- 
ing algebra and other high school branches; so 
you may say without much exaggeration that 
in a total enrollment of 1750 we have 500 in the 
high school. 

And what those students are doing in the 
high school I look upon as a result of our plan. 
We require geometry and one or two other 
things. But in the main our high school course 
is elective. I think that what our students have 
elected is quite significant of the workings of 
our plan. We believe most heartily in indus- 
trial education and have made ample provision 
for it. I think, however, that industrialism 
should be taught in the atmosphere of culture. 
A proper education implies immediate aims and 
remote aims. They should never in my opinion 
be divorced. 

I do not say that those who choose remote 
aims always choose wisely; but I do say that 
the mere fact that they have chosen remote 



170 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

aims is a high compHment to them and to their 
teacher. The election in our high school has 
compelled us to provide extensively for cultural 
as well as practical work. And this is as it 
should be. The one makes the other virile and 
available; the other humanizes, refines, and 
ennobles the one. 

It is only a corollary of the foregoing to say 
that our students are going to college in larger 
numbers and seeking the benefits of higher 
education. We have about fifty students in 
the colleges at present. And I mean the colleges 
of liberal culture as distinguished from the 
technical and professional schools. We have 
other numbers in those schools; and they make 
quite a colony, or even a community on their 
home-comings. 

The school register is I think a good index 
of the efficiency and success of the school. A 
school must take hold in order to tend toward 
a maximum of registration and a maximum of 
average daily attendance. I think that our 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 171 

registers have shown a gratifying response to 
our plan. Whatever expands the aggregate 
registration and average attendance tends to 
reduce the per capita cost of education. We 
have been reducing the per capita since the 
introduction of the Batavia plan. But we have 
also been reducing the aggregate and actual 
cost by reducing the number of buildings, the 
number of janitors, the number of separate 
equipments, and other items. The reduction 
of expense has never been a motive with us, 
but it will be of interest to those who would like 
to compare the cost of different plans. 

Our plan tends to the reduction of expense 
in another way. It has taught us the desira- 
bility of larger classes. A large class under 
proper conditions is a powerful educational 
factor. There is a point of course at which a 
class will break down by its own weight. But 
the ordinary school cannot reach that point. 
The trouble with an ordinary school is that it 
has to have many classes that are too small. 



172 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

I think it a great mistake to make small classes 
deliberately. 

An efficient school has a tendency to approach 
the condition of a balanced school as to the 
sexes. Ineffective school work tends to make 
boys cheap. I like to see something like a boy 
famine. The cheap boy sags down in school 
and he eventually sags out. It would be well 
for him if no one worse that the green-grocer 
got hold of him. When the hoodlum swarms 
in the street and infests public places it shows 
that boys are very cheap. The good school is 
the Noah's ark for the immature boy. 

The Batavia plan is not a labor-saving device; 
it is rather a labor-making device. Our teachers 
and pupils are very busy; they have much to 
do to meet on time all the demands made upon 
them. But such is the law of the matter. 
There is no royal road to a generous and sus- 
taining education. Work and sustained dili- 
gence are the price of education. Indeed work 
and diligence are education in its best aspect. 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 173 

Let no one have any fears of work and diligence. 
If force, and strain, and unkindness, and bitter- 
ness, and cross-purposes are eliminated you 
cannot impose too much work and diligence; 
the well will get sick on worry; the sick will 
get well on work and diligence. 

You will naturally ask what our experience 
has been with reference to atypical, defective 
and subnormal children. I do not see any 
reason why we should not have our share of all 
kinds of unfortunates. I believe that we do 
have our full share of them, I cite you again 
to the promotion reports. If those were select- 
ed children the data would be worth nothing. 
Those are all our children. It must be ac- 
knowledged that many children are handicapped 
at the outstart in many ways by mental and 
physical troubles. For such children there is 
no chance at all in the school that teaches only 
en masse; they are foredoomed." As to what 
can be done with them in the school that singles 
out the individual to deal with him according 



174 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

to his need, I must cite you again to the reports. 
I have to say that you will find among the 
records that are by no means the lowest some 
who were very seriously handicapped. 

Any intelligent attempt at cure implies diag- 
nosis. The mere calling of a lagging and back- 
ward child leads at once to a diagnosis of his 
case. It is often found that the mere calling 
was all that he needed. He was too far away; 
he did not see well, or he did not hear well. By 
the side of the teacher he both hears and sees 
and he looms at once in his power. He is there- 
after seated with reference to his infirmity, and 
his case is solved. With some it is a wandering 
and unmanageable attention that needs to be 
controlled and trained. With others it is a dis- 
tressing nervous timidity which has been their 
undoing. Some have that woful passivity and 
inertness so likely to mislead the inexperienced 
teacher ; so likely to cause her to pronounce that 
fatal phrase "born short", and to go on with the 
go-on-ers. But we have seen the giant roused 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 175 

too often to permit ourselves to yield to dis- 
couragement. We have "learned to labor and 
to wait". And by the way, we never have to 
wake a giant twice; when he once has realized 
his brawniness he never thereafter forgets it; 
he is never again a pygmy in his own estimation. 
Some are late arrivals in the room and need 
much adjustment. Others have been absent by 
reason of illness and have gotten out of touch 
with the work. Some are trying to make an 
extra grade. But whatever the cause may be 
the teacher has become expert in detecting it, 
and has adapted the cure to the case. Cure in 
the grade is our plan. We think that segrega- 
tion should never be thought of. 

But would I not segregate the feeble-minded 
and incorrigibles? Yes, I would consent to the 
segregation of the feeble-minded. But they 
segregate themselves; the number of hopeless 
defectives that present themselves for registra- 
tion in a public school does not amount to more 
than a fraction of one per cent. That is not 



176 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

enough to constitute a problem in a tcnvn of 
only twelve thousand inhabitants. When one 
of those unfortunates presents himself we regis- 
ter him and give him ouv best possible attention. 
And it does him gooil to mingle with normal 
children. He even learns something. No cnie 
will question the wnsdom of segregating the 
totally blind and the totally deaf. But we have 
advanced stages of defective sight and hearing 
that are doing very well. 

I am not quite ready to concede the segrega- 
tion of the incorrigible. I am not quite sure 
that a school system needs something like a 
lock-up. I am quite sure that it would be very 
wicked to "run in" to that institution children 
who have never offended, children who have 
only suffered. And I need some further evi- 
dence to convince me that a strong grade is not 
the best place for an incorrigible. 

The immediate goal of the individual teacher 
is to put the pupil into a condition to react 
against the sweep of the class, and to enable him 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 177 

to appropriate the benefits of class-membership 
and class-instruction. Knowledge is not the 
aim at the individual table; it is power, initia- 
tive, vigor. It is not a taking of him off his 
feet. It is a putting of him on his feet. 
He cannot get his lessons at the individual 
table; he can only get his power there; so 
there is no coaching. This means of course 
that the pupil cannot offer himself as a subject 
for individual attention. Every pupil knows 
that he must recite on his own preparation. If 
he does not recite well his case receives such 
attention as it merits. A plan that aims at 
vigor puts no premium on laziness or cowardice. 

Our individual teacher does nothing but ask 
questions. It is no refuge for an evader to run 
up against a questioner. No one is rendered 
weak or dependent by being asked a question. 
The question meets the needy one at a crisis in 
his life, and proves his salvation. 

Justice is defined as the giving unto each 
human being his right. The rights of an indi- 



178 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

vidual are exactly co-extensive with his needs. 
Needs, rights, and duties are correlative terms, 
covering the same exact subject or object mat- 
ter. Duty is what is due from us, and what we 
ought to do is what we owe to do. If anyone 
suffers any restriction of his right someone is 
delinquent in the discharge of his duty. Some 
one is either insolvent, or he is disregardful of 
his obligations. Children have many debtors 
because they have many needs; but there are 
few on whom they have as great and as sacred 
claims as on their teacher. 

My own convictions after fourteen years of 
experience with this plan are a result that may 
possibly be of interest. I offer them for what 
they are worth. I like our children as they are. 
I believe that they are susceptible of a fine educa- 
tion if we subject them to the dual process of 
individual attention and class stimulus. I be- 
lieve that either of these processes will break 
down without the sustaining aid of the other. 
But in due combination I think they are invin- 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 179 

cible. But the combination like other whole- 
some compounds must have its quantitative 
formula. The combination of individual and 
class instruction that gives a potency is the pro- 
portion of one to one. It is a formula easily- 
remembered; it is H. O. without any subscribed 
exponents or indices whatever. 



Chapter XXIV 

With Children of Foreign Parentage* 

At the opening of the September term in the 
Cleveland school, Ishpeming, Mich., we had 
112 first-grade children in one room, and there 
was no other room of any kind to be secured. 

The pupils are children of miners; all but 
three are of foreign parentage, and their upper- 
most thought and ambition is to learn to talk, 
read, and write the English language, and the 
father and mother are anxious to adopt the 
American language and customs. They are 
mostly Finns. Their first aim is to send their 
children to school. 

These first-grade children really teach their 
fathers, mothers, and adult uncles, cousins, 
aunts, and boarders the English they learn in 
school. 



* From New England Journal of Education. By Winifred 
Lacy, M.PD., Principal and Primary Teacher, Cleveland School, 
Ishpeming, Mich. 

(180) 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 181 

I was facing a proposition more easily imagin- 
ed than described. Superintendent E. E. Scrib- 
ner settled it offhand by saying: "Use the Bata- 
via system." The readers of the Journal of 
Education have long been familiar with the 
general plan of Superintendent John Kennedy 
of Batavia, N. Y., which he introduced to that 
city in 1898. 

I took charge of the room myself and took as 
my assistant a high school graduate with no 
experience. At first there was scarcely a child 
who could understand, much less speak, Eng- 
lish. For three weeks we worked on faith and 
motions chiefly. Think of two of us starting 
in with 112 such children. 

We alternated recitation and individual work. 
While my assistant heard a reading lesson, for 
instance, I took the slower children in the other 
part of the class and helped them on the difficult 
words and phrases of the lesson they would soon 
recite to her. 

I assisted the laggards so that they were the 



182 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

bright ones when they came to their reading 
lesson. They knew that they knew the words 
and phrases and were eager to show how well 
they could read. They had a relish for the 
lesson. They were no longer timid. 

The children not helped much were quick 
enough to read by themselves. Lesson after 
lesson would pass without a child's halting or 
stumbling over a word or phrase. They could 
read two or three times as much in a given period 
as is customary. Every child was in the game 
confidently. 

His help had come quietly, individually, and 
in advance rather than publicly and humiliat- 
ingly after failure. 

The results were equally surprising in writing, 
in spelling, in language, in music, and in draw- 
ing. 

At the end of four months these 112 children 
were much in advance of a similar room with 
forty-five children taught in the regular way 
by an extra good teacher. 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 183 

The class will be promoted as a whole, not 
more than three or four being retained of the 
112 who entered last September. In a class 
of forty-five by the ordinary teaching about 
ten or twelve will be retarded, or a rate of 
twenty-five to thirty out of 112. 

But the gain is not wholly for the child. It 
is a great blessing to the teachers. Who can 
estimate the strain upon a teacher who from day 
to day has from a fourth to a third of her class 
hanging back on her nerves all the time? 

Nothing could be more depressing than this. 
It clouds the atmosphere of the school, it wears 
upon the bright children, it deadens more and 
more the slow ones, it saps the teacher's energy, 
racks her nerves, and often wrecks her life. 

On the other hand, there is nothing more in- 
spiring than the conquest of ignorance by a 
child. There is tonic like an ocean breeze in 
seeing child after child gain individual power 
in reading, writing, spelling, use of English, 
music and drawing. 



184 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

Who can describe the joy of a teacher who has 
seen her naturally slow pupils become bright, 
eager, with a conquering-hero spirit? It is also 
economical, because the work of a quarter of the 
class does not have to be done over again. 

All honor to John Kennedy of Batavia for 
what he has done for the Cleveland school of 
Ishpeming, and this school is but one of a 
thousand in England and America. 

The pity of it all is that tens of thousands of 
schools waste the time of children, waste public 
money, and ruin teachers' lives, and often be- 
cause of traditional prejudice. 



Chapter XXV 

Advantage over After-school Assistance* 

Pursuant to the vote of your committee it 
was my privilege to make during the month an 
investigation of the working of the Batavia 
plan, so-called, of individual instruction. I 
submit for your consideration the following 
report. 

Everything seemed to favor the purpose of 
our visit. 

We had ample opportunity to see the working 
of the plan in the rooms with two teachers, in 
those with one teacher only and in the classes 
of the high school. There is no difference in 
the value or practicability under either of these 
conditions. The whole problem in each case 
is a matter of arranging the school programme 
to allow time for both class and individual in- 



Report of Sup't Stanley H. Holmes, Haverhill, Mass. 

(185) 



186 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

struction. The plan is so simple, so sensible 
and so satisfactory in its operation that it seems 
a marvel that it has not been worked out long 
before its development in Batavia. As you 
step into one of the large rooms in the Batavia 
schools you observe that it is occupied by from 
60 to 70 pupils, arranged so as to face the inner 
side of the room. There are two teachers in the 
room — one a class teacher the other an indi- 
vidual teacher. Each is busy and undisturbed 
by the work of the other. The class teacher is 
at one side in the front of the room conducting 
a class exercise with division one. It may be an 
exercise devoted to the development of some 
new or advanced topic of the subject as the 
metric system. The entire division is alert and 
attentive, and, so far as this work is concerned, 
the exercise differs in no respect from a similar 
exercise in our own schools. It may be, how- 
ever, that the teacher is devoting the period of 
the class exercise to a recitation by the pupils 
upon some topic or phase of the subject which 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 187 

has already been developed or taught in some 
previous class period. If this be the case, we 
find that the teacher is keeping in mind the 
purpose of the exercise as a testing exercise to 
find out what the pupils know of the topic and 
discover those who do not know. She keeps 
this purpose of testing clearly in mind and does 
not confuse it with the purpose of the other type 
of class exercise mentioned above, which is de- 
voted to, the development of a new topic, and 
in this testing exercise the teacher does little 
more than to ask questions, as the recitation 
progresses. We note that she has close at hand 
a pencil and paper. If a pupil rises at her call 
to recite and is unable to give a satisfactory 
recitation, or says he does not know, the teacher 
makes note of his failure on the paper which 
she has at hand and without waiting longer and 
without making any attempt then and there 
to develop the subject for the benefit of this 
single pupil who has failed, without keeping 
the class waiting to listen to the ineffectual 



188 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

attempts of a child who knows little or nothing 
of the topic in hand, the teacher tells the pupil 
to sit and passes on with the work, calling up 
another pupil. And so the work progresses 
during the entire class period, without break 
or interruption. At the clos'e these things have 
been accomplished: Those pupils who under- 
stand the topic have had an opportunity to 
recite upon it and thus by oral statement to 
fix it more firmly in mind, and at the same time 
gain practice in oral expression. Those pupils 
who have failed have been noted and the teacher 
is prepared to report to her colleague the names 
of those who are weak in the subject or topic 
and who need special help upon it. During all 
this time the pupils of division two are profitably 
occupied with quiet study upon the subject 
which the school programme calls for, while 
the second or individual teacher sits in the front 
of the room facing this division at a table at 
which two chairs have been placed, one of which 
she occupies and the other of which is occupied 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 189 

by a pupil whom she has called out for indi- 
vidual instruction. There is no noise in this 
end of the room. This individual instruction 
is all given so quietly that except for the ocular 
evidence one would not suspect that such a 
thing is going on in the room. If we take pains 
to get close enough to see and hear just what 
this individual teacher is doing we find that in 
a low, pleasant, sympathetic tone of voice she 
is leading the pupil to help himself and to master 
his difficulty for himself. These is no loudness 
or harshness of tone, there is no impression left 
upon the pupil but that which sympathetic 
helpfulness from the teacher and his own mas- 
tery of difficulty will leave, and he goes to his 
seat after 5, 10, or 15 minutes of this sort of 
help with a new courage and hope, a feeling of 
increased mastery and power, and the conviction 
that if he will help himself he will in time mg^ster 
all the obstacles that hinder his progress and 
will pass on with his classmates at the close of 
the year's work. At the close of the period the 



190 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

two teachers exchange divisions, the class teach- 
er to do class work with division two, and the 
individual teacher to do individual work with 
division one. The work of conducting the work 
in the room with but a single teacher does not 
differ materially from that in the two-teacher 
room. The programme must be so arranged 
as to make one half of the periods in a subject 
as arithmetic, for example, class periods and 

one half individual instruction periods. While 
the individual work is going on the class is 
occupied in profitable study. There are a few 
of our schoolrooms in which it would be feasible 
to so arrange the work that two teachers might 
be employed in them without adding to our 
present teaching force. In nearly all of our 
rooms, however, one teacher only, as at present, 
should be employed. 

In- the high school where the departmental 
plan of work is in operation, as it is in our high 
school, the periods for work in any subject with 
a class alternate, one being devoted to class in- 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 191 

struction or class recitation and the next day's 
period to individual work in the same subject, 
while the class as a whole is profitably employed 
upon written drill work or study that has to do 
with the subject at hand. The high school 
programme is not arranged at all differently 
on account of this individual instruction. The 
question naturally arises, What do the Batavia 
teachers think of this plan of doing school work? 
In no case did inquiry elicit anything but a 
favorable opinion of its value and practicability. 
They believe in it and they will tell you in every 
room that they plan and expect that at the end 
of the year they will send forward their grades 
in unbroken ranks, and that the only pupils 
who will not secure promotion will be in those 
possible cases where children may have entered 
the schools so late in the summer term that not 
enough individual instruction can be given to 
bring them up to the grade. From what I was 
able to discover from a careful examination of 
the working and results, and from what I have 



192 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

learned of its working in places where it has 
been tried, I would report that the impression 
made upon my own mind was distinctly favor- 
able. It is always the pupil who, because of 
natural slowness, or absence, or some other 
cause, has failed to comprehend and so has 
fallen behind his class who is carried constantly 
in the mind of the conscientious, thoughtful 
teacher, and it is this pupil whom such a teacher 
is always anxious and ready to work for and 
work with to bring about improvement and ad- 
vancement. The trouble has been not in a 
lack of willingness to work or a lack of anxiety 
for better things on the part of the teacher. It 
has lain in the notion that the time and place 
to reach the individual is the regular class reci- 
tation period or in hours other than regular 
school hours, i. e., by keeping after school. Be- 
cause of this notion teachers have striven con- 
stantly to bring the methods of the recitation 
as near as possible to perfection, thinking that 
excellent teaching and recitation methods ought 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 193 

to reach a much greater proportion of the class, 
if not all. They have also been ready to devote 
much time out of school hours to such pupils 
as could be induced to come for individual help 
and instruction. To be sure, from improved 
methods of presentation and recitation we can 
always see tangible and encouraging results, 
but with the best of teaching skill applied only 
in recitation there is always left a section of the 
class which is not reached, and which as a result 
fails in promotion at the end of the year. Indi- 
vidual instruction given out of school hours is 
also fruitful of results, but is open to the serious 
objection that the regular school hours are long 
enough and taxing enough for both teacher and 
pupil who is compelled to remain after school 
for help is in no mood to receive from the in- 
struction the fullest benefit. He feels that it 
is an unjustice to him to compel him to stay for 
longer than the regular hours, so the number 
who are really much benefited from such after- 
school help is necessarily limited, almost entirely, 



194 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

to those few who voluntarily ask for such help, 
the fact being that such pupils as do ask for 
this after-school assistance are pretty sure to 
be the most satisfactory and interested pupils 
in the class, who need help the least of any. 

In other words teachers have over magnified 
the value of the class recitation and instruction 
exercise in reaching the individual pupil. The 
purpose of this class exercise period may be to 
instruct, i. e., to teach. It may be to test and 
if to test it is also to train in oral expression. 
It is erroneous and wasteful to devote any large 
portion of the class period to an effort to reach 
the pupil who fails or is behind his classmates. 
To take such a time for individual teaching is 
embarrassing to the slow pupil and decidedly 
uninteresting and wasteful for the rest of the 
class who must wait. 

I have already shown why individual instruc- 
tion after school hours is likely to be unpro- 
fitable. 

In the working of the Batavia plan there is no 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 195 

loss of class time. The weak pupil is definitely 
known and noted together with his particular 
weakness. There is very little, if any, cause 
for embarrassment for the weak pupil, as he is 
not made to stand and flounder about while 
the teacher attempts to give him individual 
instruction in the presence of the idle, waiting 
class. Then again, under this plan, no weak 
pupil is neglected or is able to escape the help 
of the teacher, for he is known, his weakness is 
known, and he is given quiet, sympathetic, 
individual help during the regular school hours, 
not being expected or even encouraged to re- 
main after the regular school hours. 

Home study for pupils of elementary grades 
is practically eliminated by this plan. When 
the school room door closes at noon or night 
the children of these grades leave their school 
work behind them as they should. This is due 
to the fact that the time for quiet, intensive 
study in the school room is much increased. 
This alone is a very desirable feature of the plan. 



196 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

Under prevailing methods of management in 
most schools there is too much of bustle and 
recitation work and too little quiet studious 
application to tasks. This has arisen, of course, 
from the anxiety on the teacher's part to reach 
the individual (as well as the class) and the idea 
that has possessed her mind that the only route 
to an}'- goal lay through the teaching and recita- 
tion exercise. 

I cannot close without saying a word with 
respect to one of the most noticeable and satis- 
factory results of the plan, its moral effect on 
teacher and pupils. It would perhaps be better 
to say little rather then much on this particular 
thing and so leave those who make a trial of 
the plan to find this out for themselves. Its 
effect is sure to be beneficial in lessening the 
teacher's feeling of strain and anxiety because 
of the unsatisfactory ones in her class, for with 
this plan she may have the hope of helping those 
who so much need help and instruction. It 
puts the teacher, too, into .an attitude of sympa- 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 197 

thy and appreciation for the weak or slow pupil. 
She better understands him and his need after 
he has sat beside her for a few minutes from 
day to day, while she has tried to develop in 
him greater power and to help him to more rapid 
progress. It also places the pupil who needs 
help in an equally sympathetic and appreciative 
attitude toward his teacher. He feels now that 
his teacher is his friend and not his task-master. 
As one teacher expressed herself to me: "This 
individual work makes me feel altogether dif- 
ferent toward the slow boy when he gets up to 
recite, for I understand him better and he under- 
stands me better." 

It relieves pupils, too, from their all too 
common anxiety about the possibility of pro- 
motion and non-promotion at the end of the 
school year, for the strong pupil does more and 
better work and the weak pupil has the hope of 
having the obstacles to progress removed and 
of emerging from his present condition of weak- 
ness. It puts courage into both teacher and 
pupil. 



198 THE BAT AVI A SYSTEM 

I might mention also the better attitude 
which it causes the parent to assume toward 
the school when he reaHzes that the teacher is 
actually making an effort to do for his child 
.who may be behind in any subject the very 
thing which the parent would himself do for 
his child in giving him individual help provided 
the parent had the requisite knowledge of school 
requirements, the necessary teaching skill and 
the time to devote to the matter. 

I have not mentioned its effect upon the dis- 
cipline of the school. The good order, the quiet 
atmosphere, the eagerness and cheerfulness in 
attacking and performing new tasks were all 
marked features of the Batavia schools, resultant 
undoubtedly from this system of individual 
instruction. But I leave the mention of those 
things to my colleagues of the special committee. 

I have but one recommendation to make — 
that the plan be given a fair trial in our schools. 
I have faith to believe that in the hands of a 
force of teachers of such ability and teaching 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 199 

skill as our own the plan will prove itself a 
success and will win loyal and enthusiastic sup- 
port. There is need of it in every grade from 
the first through the high school, and with the 
sanction of the school board and a fair trial in 
the schools there is every reason to look for 
excellent results. 



Chapter XXVI 

Development of the Spirit of Work* 

The Batavia system of individual instruction 
had its origin in a very common occurrence — 
that of an over-crowded school. To relieve 
the situation the superintendent secured the 
service of an experienced teacher who had re- 
tired from school on account of ill health. 

It was arranged that all pupils who were slow, 
backward or for any reason not up to the work 
of the grade, should be sent to her for special 
help. 

As days and weeks went by she became par- 
ticularly interested in each child, his progress, 
work and steadily increasing power to do for 
himself. 

The standard of the whole class was raised 
and as the plan became a success in that room. 



*Miss Reed's Report to the School Board of Haverhill, Mass. 

(200) 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 201 

the superintendent authorized its use in others 
where the numbers were sufficiently large to 
require the services of two teachers. 

The next step was to adapt the method to 
classes with one teacher, and the following plan 
was devised. 

After a regular class recitation another lesson 
is assigned in the usual manner for the next 
day, possibly longer than under the old plan. 
All who are equal to the work study by them- 
selves during the period while the teacher is 
left free to give instruction to any who need it. 

She will have noted already in the previous 
class exercise who these are. They come to 
her desk or table, and, while I sat by giving my 
close attention, I did not hear a pupil told a 
single word or point until it was actually neces- 
sary — instead, he was led by skilful questioning 
through the difficulty to find his own errors, 
thus gaining power and courage for the next 
task. 

In a few words I will name what, in my judg- 



202 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

ment, are some of the advantages of this system. 
First. It is individual as the name indicates 

• 

The teacher knows precisely each pupil's dif- 
ficulty. It may be a small one in her opinion 
but to him it is a huge obstacle — there is no 
progress until it is removed. In class work the 
ordinary child is very liable to feel he is only 
one of many, and the responsibility of following 
the recitation is cast upon others — the few who 
are always ready. He may not actually go 
through this process of reasoning but as far as 
his knowledge goes, it amounts to the same 
thing. When he sits by his teacher and her 
attention is given to him alone, this cannot 
be — there can be no reason for shirking here. 

Second. A definite and regular period is 
arranged for this assistance. It is constant 
and therefore steadily progressive. 

Third. As the power of a child grows he 
gains confidence, courage and a willingness to 
work. I never saw more industrious classes 
than in Batavia. Very little of the spirit of 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 203 

indifference was noticeable, but in its place a 
readiness to persevere until the work was ac- 
complished. 

I desire to consider two of the objections that 
have been brought to my notice. 

It is said these pupils will become dependent 
and form the habit of relying upon others. 

I do not think so. My own experience is that 
the majority of children are interested in doing 
whatever they can do well. 

Their progress may be slow and laborious, 
but guided by a strong, sympathetic teacher, 
one who recognizes individual differences and 
shows pupils how to study, how to find their 
own errors and correct them, they will learn 
gradually the still greater and more important 
lesson of using and depending upon their own 
abilities. 

In one sense, children are not by nature alto- 
gether dependent, and it is the wise parent or 
teacher who does not allow circumstances or 
environment to weaken the faculty of inde- 
pendence. 



204 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

It has also further been said that the so-called 
bright pupils are neglected and suffer from this 
system. I do not feel that this is necessary. 
In a quiet hour of study, they are surely made 
to depend more upon themselves, which is the 
wisest thing that can be done for them. 

Plenty of work is always provided, and an 
opportunity is given to each one to move on 
according to his individual ability. If, for any 
reason, they need special attention, the fact 
will soon become apparent. 

In my own experience, I have found that 
brilliant scholars are very few, and I, for one, 
am not sorry, for I believe in work, work, and 
the vigor and strength of character which it 
alone brings. 

I realize that true progress in most cases is 
achieved by patient, plodding labor — not by 
leaps and bounds. The slow pupils must be 
encotiraged. We need them in school and in 
the larger world. They usually become reliable 
citizens and oftQn are learers in successful, hon- 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 205 

orable business enterprises. For these reasons 
and others I beheve absolutely in the underlying 
principle of the Batavia system. 

Just one word for the teachers of Haverhill. 
Many of us have already been trying to work 
along this line. We have considered the matter 
again and again and have ever been the friend 
of the slow, possibly the dull pupil. We have 
done everything in our power to hold him in the 
school, endeavoring not to allow petty troubles 
and boyish pranks to mar our view of the future 
man or woman who sits day after day before 
us, for the thoughtful teacher ever keeps her 
face toward the future. 

It seems to me two things at least may be 
done. 

We may have a systematic plan and a regular 
time for individual instruction, without which 
very little is accomplished in any line. 

We already have the interest and co-opera- 
tion of our superintendent. 



206 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

Now we desire the authority and support of 
the school board. 
Shall we have it? 

Respectfully submitted, 

Mary A. Reid, 
Principal of Crowell School. 



Chapter XXVII 

Personal Aid under Favorable Conditions* 

The "Batavia plan" has been widely adver- 
tised, and its praise sounded in such glowing 
terms that it has, perhaps, suffered from the 
friends it has made. We are always suspicious 
of a "cure all' educationally or otherwise. 
When, therefore, it became my duty to make a 
personal examination, I was not free from a 
feeling of distrust. I was willing to see, and 
expecting to see good; but also on the lookout 
for its weaknesses. Visiting 25 or more school 
rooms, many of them more than once, I saw 
fairly well the working of the system, and came 
away a stronger believer in it than when I went. 
As you already know, the plan of teaching 
calls for an equal division of the teacher's time 
between class work and individual teaching. 



*Report of Principal Gray of the Winter street school, 

Haverhill, .Mass. 

(207) 



208 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

There is probably no teacher in Haverhill who 
has not given individual instruction, but in 
Batavia a method has been developed by which 
unusually happy results are attained. Perhaps 
most teachers have sometimes given help to 
pupils in much the same manner in which it is 
done there, but it has been the unusual, infre- 
quent thing. Often our teachers have done 
this work after the regular session, a time when 
neither pupil not teacher is in the best condi- 
tion for work. Often the pupil who has not 
recited satisfactorily is kept standing while the 
teacher fires volleys of explanation, questions 
and perhaps, criticism, excellent in themselves, 
but with their effect greatly lessened by the un- 
happy condition of the pupil, his failure empha- 
sized before all the class until her well-meant 
efforts to help him over his difficulties are largely 
a failure. 

The essence of the Batavia system is that 
personal aid is given under the most favorable 
conditions possible. No pupil who had failed 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 209 

to recite satisfactorily would there be required 
to stand in his place in a crowded room, while 
from a distance his teacher explained, questioned 
or criticised in tones that none could fail to hear. 
Instead, she would wait until the period for 
individual instruction, when, having provided 
work for the class — study or written work' — she 
would quietly call the pupil to her, and, speaking 
in gentle undertones, help him with his difficulty. 
She would do this in the best way, telling little, 
but leading the pupil to see for himself. The 
character of the aid given is a matter of confi- 
dence between the pupil and the teacher. The 
others have their work, and even if they listened, 
they would be able to hear little of what was said. 
Thus, while the pupil reveals his difficulty to 
his teacher, his weakness is not exposed to the 
possible ridicule of his fellow pupils. His 
teacher gets at the trouble which he would, per- 
haps, hesitate to confess in the hearing of his 
class; for some children will even declare that 
they understand rather than admit that they 



210 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

fail to comprehend that which seems to present 
no difficultues to others of their class. It is not 
children alone who dislike to admit to a multi- 
tude the failure to see the point, while glad to 
be set right privately by a friend. 

This, then, is one point essential to the success 
of the system under consideration; there must 
be a large degree of privacy. The teacher helps 
the pupil without scorching him with public 
criticism, open or implied, thus making him the 
possible butt of his fellows. Another thing and 
very important — she has not only realized the 
value of a gentle voice, that most "excellent 
thing in woman" — she has kept in mind that 
physically the pupil must be comfortable and at 
ease if he is to do his best, and so a table has 
been provided and a chair. There is room for 
the awkward boy to bestow his long legs, and 
the table is broad enough to permit him to get 
his arms comfortable upon it, if there is work 
to be done with pencil and paper. These are 
not trivial matters, unworthy of consideration. 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 211 

Every teacher has seen pupils who suffered 
torture through consciousness of their awkward 
bodies, and it is folly to expect that under such 
conditions they will do their best thinking. 

By means of this plan of conducting school 
work, it is very evident that much more cordial 
relations are likely to exist between pupil and 
teacher. We get nearer to a person by con- 
versing with him than by hearing him lecture. 
The children are helped over the hard places 
and, understanding their work, enjoy it. With 
children, as with grown people, the thing that 
is understood is liked. No one goes far in any- 
thing that he does not enjoy doing. It is easier 
to depress and disgust human nature than to 
inspire it. We want the rewards of self-respect, 
the sense of victory achieved, the feeling of 
getting ahead. The teacher who gives indi- 
vidual instruction in the best way makes these 
things possible. 

I do not claim that this method lightens the 
teacher's labors. It makes them more effective, 



212 THE BAT AVI A SYSTEM 

and thus removes the most discouraging thing 
that any teacher has to contend with — the 
feehng that she is not accomphshing what she 
knows she ought. 

I ought not to close without mentioning what 
after all is the most attractive, and, I believe, 
most important result of the method, though not 
the one usually made most prominent by those 
who advocate it. This is its moral effect, its 
value in character shaping. If it had no other 
value its use would be justified by this alone. 



^ 



Chapter XXVIII 

As seen i?i Canada* 

My attention was first drawn to the schools 
of Batavia, New York, some ten or twelve years 
ago, when two pupils from that city presented 
themselves for enrolment in my school. I soon 
discovered in them a power for work and an 
independence of thought that was somewhat 
unusual. On making inquiries I learned some- 
thing of what is known as the Batavian System, 
and ever since that time I have had a desire to 
investigate the system, and see it in actual 
operation. 

An opportunity to gratify this desire was 
afforded me in October, 1912. I received a 
very cordial welcome from the City Superin- 
tendent, Mr. John Kennedy, and the Principal 
of the High School, Mr. E. A. Ladd, and his 



*Report of Dr. J. A. Houston, Inspector of high schools 
Province of Ontario to the Minister of Education. 

(213) 



214 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

staff of teachers, and was given every oppor- 
tunity of seeing how their work was carried on. 
I visited the primary classes in the elementary 
schools, the higher classes in the grammar grade 
(corresponding to our junior and senior fourth), 
and the classes in the High School, observed 
the work of the teachers both with the class 
and with the individual pupil, examined the 
records of the pupils, and questioned many of 
the teachers as to their methods of dealing with 
the difficulties which must necessarily present 
themselves in a High School of over four hun- 
dred pupils. I wish to place on record here my 
appreciation of the many courtesies received 
from the Superintendent, teachers, and pupils 
during my investigation. 

The plan now adopted in the schools of Bata- 
via had its genesis in an overcrowded room of 
some sixty pupils, for whom there was no room 
elsewhere. To relieve the congestion, a some- 
what novel scheme was proposed, namely, to 
put in the room another teacher whose time 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 215 

should be given to those pupils who were found 
to be lagging behind their fellows. Her especial 
duty was to deal with the backward pupil, and 
give him an opportunity to make something of 
himself. The teacher selected to carry out this 
experiment was one gifted with a rare personality 
and superior teaching power, and to say that 
the experiment proved a success would be to 
put it very mildly. The dull pupil disappeared ; 
the atmosphere of the room changed; the spirit 
of work prevailed; there were no longer bright 
pupils with nothing to do and slow pupils who 
could do nothing. The plan was extended to 
other overcrowded rooms with equal success. 
Then came the question, was this change 
for the better to be attributed to the presence 
of two teachers in a room, or to the combination 
of individual and class instruction? A further 
experiment was tried in one- teacher rooms, 
with normal sized classes. This was to devote 
to class instruction one half the time appor- 
tioned to any subject, and give the other half 



216 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

to individual work with pupils who required it. 
This experiment proved such a decided success 
that the plan has been carried on for some 
twelve years or more, and no teacher in Batavia 
today would desire for one moment to revert 
to the old order of things. 

I can best give the fundamental idea under- 
lying the Batavia plan by quoting from a report 
made by Superintendent Kennedy. He says: 
"All normal children are susceptible of educa- 
tion if they are dealt with in accordance with 
their natures. Our plan of supplementary indi- 
vidual teaching enables us to reach the indi- 
vidual needs of children, and to put them in the 
way of maintaining themselves in a graded 
system. The graded system is, in my opinion, 
a powerful, even a necessary instrumentality 
in the education of the vast majority of children. 
It is the visible ladder by which the children 
climb to success. The motives of children 
must be immediate and concrete, and when this 
concrete progress is inspired by interest and the 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 217 

sense of achievement, success is assured. It is 
because children are neither aUke nor equal 
that they have to be attended to individually. 
Their individuality is their most precious pos- 
session, and that individuality, individual at- 
tention tends to conserve. It is not their 
inferiority but their individuality which makes 
them nonresponsive and obstructive." 

The scheme of class-individual instruction in 
Batavia is carried out in two different ways. 

(1) In certain overcrowded rooms two teach- 
ers are employed, one in class instruction, the 
other in individual work. This method is used 
in only a few of the lower grades of the elemen- 
tary schools. I saw this plan in operation, and 
there was not the slightest sign of confusion. 
Every one seemed happy and contented, and 
I was assured by the teachers that the progress 
of the pupils was all that could be desired. 

(2) In all the classes of the elementary schools, 
which are not overcrowded, and in all the classes 
of the High School, the teacher devotes to class 



218 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

work one half the time assigned to any subject, 
and the other half to individual work. As 
Superintendent Kennedy points out: "This 
phase of the plan permits its extension and use 
under all conditions. It has furnished the 
solution for the problem of individualizing the 
High School." 

In addition to this plan of dividing the class 
time, the courses of study and the time-table, 
in the High School, are so arranged that every 
pupil has about one third of his time in school 
to devote to quiet study and work by himself, 
either in the general study room, or in the class- 
room where individual work is going on. 

The three elements which go to make up the 
Batavia plan then are: 

(1) Class instruction in the lesson as a whole, 
combined with the recitation and tests necessary 
to ascertain whether the pupil is doing his work, 
is gaining the desired knowledge, and is mas- 
tering the subjects assigned for study. 

(2) Individual attention, given when requir- 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 219 

ed, to gain the confidence and learn the disposi- 
tion of the pupil; to discover his difficulties; to 
give him judicious help by encouragement, 
questions, or suggestions; to put him in the way 
of helping himself. 

(3) Regular periods for study, to give the 
pupil a chance to find himself, to gain self- 
reliance, independence, self-initiative, and to 
experience the joy of achievement. 

Any plan or system of education may be 
judged in two ways: (1) by considering its theo- 
retic merits and its inherent excellencies as 
tested by its agreement with correct pedagogic 
principles, and (2) by ascertaining the results 
which have followed its use for a reasonable 
length of time amongst those for whom it was 
intended. 

Examined from the first of these view-points, 
the Batavia plan will stand the test. 

(1) It combines the advantages of the graded 
or organized school, with those of the unorgan- 
ized school of form.er days. 



220 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

(2) It provides for the class instruction which 
is necessary to economize time and conserve the 
energy of the teacher in presenting his subject. 

(3) It offers the stimulus and emulation of 
numbers working together for a common pur- 
pose, than which there is no more powerful in- 
fluence in an average class. 

(4) It recognizes the fact that there is no 
uniformity in the nature of children, and that 
individual needs can be satisfied only by indi- 
vidual attention. 

(5) It enables the teacher to study the per- 
sonality of each pupil and to accomodate his 
instruction to each one's peculiar requirements. 

When considered from the second of the view- 
points already mentioned, the results shown in 
the Batavia schools, where the system has been 
in force for some twelve or fourteen years, are 
most satisfactory. 

(1) It has the effect of retaining the pupils 
in the schools. Out of a total school attendance 
of 1,800, I found over 400 in the High School, 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 221 

boys and girls being about equal in numbers. 
In the graduating class of June, 1911, there were 
19 boys out of a total 32. 

(2) It has practically eliminated failures in 
examinations. I examined the official reports 
from the Board of Regents at Albany on the 
results of their examinations in the Batavia 
High School, and found that the failures were 
less than one per cent. 

(3) It has done away with the question of 
discipline, by removing the usual cause of the 
restlessness of a large proportion of the class, 
who are frequently left unoccupied, while the 
teacher explains to a few, perhaps to one pupil, 
a matter already thoroughly understood by 

the others. 

(4) It has introduced a spirit of earnestness 
and interest which was manifest in every form 
in the school ; every one seemed to feel that his 
ultimate success was a reasonable certainly. 

(5) It has produced a class of independent 
and self-reliant pupils who appear to have 



222 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

confidence in themselves and their powers, who 
have the spirit of work and the power to work. 

(6) It has done away with the slow, unre- 
sponsive pupil who keeps the class back, by 
giving the assistance necessary to enable him 
to solve the personal equations whose unknowns 
were his latent energy and his confidence in 
himself. 

In my report to the Minister on the condition 
of the High Schools under my supervision, I 
referred briefly to the wisdom of introducing 
into our system of teaching more study periods 
for the pupil and more attention to his indi- 
vidual needs. The adoption of some scheme 
along the line indicated in the preceding pages, 
with such modifications as would make it suit 
the different conditions in our schools, would, 
I am convinced, be of very great advantage. 
The serious defect of our present system is its 
want of elasticity; it is too machine-like in its 
operation; it makes provision for the classes, 
it fails to make provision, except incidentally. 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 223 

for individual needs. The remedy appears 
to be what the Batavia plan provides, "organized 
individual instruction as the supplement and 
corrective of class instruction." 



Chapter XXIX 

What to do with the Laggard* 

What to do with the laggard in schools is a 
question pressing for an answer throughout the 
civilized world. Compulsory attendance and 
the exceedingly close organization of schools 
have made the laggard problem decidedly acute. 

When attendance was voluntary and when 
schools were loose aggregations instead of 
organizations, the laggard could be ignored. 
If he sagged, he did not drag anybody else down. 
He just sagged down alone. When the school 
became insufferably tedious to him he just 
eliminated himself, and found congenial employ- 
ment in the busy world, where his teeming energy 
and luminous intelligence found "ample room 
and verge enough." He went forth to be a 
great provider, a model husband, and father, 



*From an address to the New York State Holiday Confer- 
ence of High School Principals. 

(224) 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 225 

a sterling citizen and a pillar of the state accord- 
ing to his lights. The only drawback in his 
case was that his light was not sufficient to 
enable him to see all the dangers of the state. 
He was exposed to be the dupe of those who 
were only too willing to do his seeing for him. 

The laggard cannot eliminate himself now. 
If he tries to do so he encounters a truant officer 
who runs him back in again. The laggard now 
encounters not only the tediousness of the 
school, but also its pinch. And a lad that has 
been pinched in school is not an assured triumph 
in civil life. We read in Scripture of a person 
whose last stage was worse than his first. 

I have some tributes to pay to non-organiza- 
tion. It started many a great man on the way 
to fame and fortune. It opened an unobstruct- 
ed course to those rare ones who could run alone, 
and who could maintain themselves without 
resting brakes, while ascending the hill of 
knowledge. The unorganized school never 
made any business for ,the doctor, nor for the 
undertaker, nor for the constable. 



226 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

On the other hand the unorganized school 
let its laggards escape; and it discouraged all 
the rest of the children by giving them the task 
of Sisyphus; rolling the same old stone up the 
same old hill and ever finding it at the bottom 
again. The unorganized school was weighed 
in the balance and was found wanting. It has 
been retired. I am glad to say that it has 
passed. It has been passing into history, not 
without many claims to respect. But it will 
never return. It should never return. 

I have hinted that organization has dire 
possibilities; and I am not through with them 
yet; there is still to be considered the tragedy 
of retardation. But the prevention of these 
evils does not lie, in my opinion, in putting the 
clock of time back fifty years. The great 
nineteenth century recognized the evils of non- 
organization ; it grappled boldly with chaos; 
and it has left us a marvelous monument of 
itself in a most magnificently organized school 
system. It is for the twentieth century to 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 227 

conserve and preserve that school system; to 
rectify and perfect it; to take every pinch out 
of it; to make everybody safe, happy, and suc- 
cessful who has anything to do with it. 

Under the new order the laggard is decidedly 
in evidence. And he is most painfully aware 
of it. If he sags all the rest of the pupils are 
retarded; and they become great sufferers, — 
educationally, intellectually, morally, and even 
physically. The protests against retardation 
are loud; and justly so. The devices for the 
relief of retardation are at least interesting, 
even if they are not always w^ise, just, and sound. 
Some are saying that a crowd is preposterous, 
and that the quick individual needs to be dis- 
engaged. If he needs to be disengaged the slow 
individual needs it more imperatively; and 
therefore organization is a failure; we have 
simply snared our children. This is indeed 
plausible; for we have snared many children. 
But I hope to show that we have no right and 
no occasion to make a snare of organization. 



228 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

But let us keep to the laggard awhile. When 
the laggard sags now, he does not sag away 
from the teacher; he sags right onto her. He 
gets on to her nerve. He breaks down her 
geniality; he breaks down her composure; he 
breaks down her teaching. 

There can be tragedy in schools if organiza- 
tion is not controlled to beneficent ends. Then 
why take the chances on organization? Be- 
cause without organization education is spirit- 
less and unproductive. Organization is Samson 
in the full growth of his locks. Organization 
is the Archimedean lever that can uplift the 
world. 

No, we will not go back. The pathway of 
education is now surveyed and staked off. 
Every child can see the stakes leading to a 
definite goal. He fights for his stake before he 
fights for the ideal. And the stakes make the 
ideal attainable. The primary child sees the 
stakes extending into and through the university. 

The teacher now has a definite and sharply 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 229 

defined task, instead of a vague one. The 
principle of the division of labor has been made 
the key to an aggregate momentum. Waste 
has been reduced to a minimum, if it has not 
been entirely eliminated. All the conditions 
of success have been contrived; and success is 
the mandate placed upon the management in 
charge. 

But here comes in the laggard. Organiza- 
tion may propose; but the laggard disposes. 
The laggard commands the situation. Till he 
budges nothing can budge. The machine is 
clogged. The sickle, to change the figure, will 
not work; the reaper kills its horses in merely 
mutilating and ruining every spear of grain that 
it reaches. 

The immediate cause is the laggard; he is the 
clog. If the laggard blocks the game, then why 
not get rid of the laggard? I think I see several 
potent reasons why not. One very important 
reason is that it can't be done. 

You cannot put the laggard out of school; 



230 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

for the law will not let you do so. And here I 
bow to the wisdom of the law, as well as to its 
majesty. Nor can you always kill the laggard; 
we have all seen laggards who have become 
persecution proof. 

Then why not demote him? For two good 
reasons: First, he will sag the lower class, besides 
disgusting them with his huge presence; and in 
the second place, you will find new laggards 
doing his work in the grade from which he has 
been removed. It is a case of cutting off the 
head of the hydra only to breed two. The same 
would be true if you relegated him to a dunce 
class or "ran him in" with incorrigibles for 
merely being unfortunate. If you can bring 
yourself to do that thing, and if he and his 
parents would submit to it, you only provide 
for his successor. 

I have never known a child who did not find 
his highest happiness in conquering a difficulty. 
And I have never known a child who has con- 
quered a difficulty who did not want other 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 231 

difficulties to conquer. They are all Alexanders ; 
the taste of conquest inspires in them the lust 
of conquest. Education is a state of mind and 
character ; the child is educated who has learned 
to do creditable things, and who is on the alert 
for creditable things to do. 

"A still strong man in a blatant land," he 
"stands four-square to every wind that blows." 
The world needs such men, and the school that 
gives such men is one of the greatest blessings 
in the world. The good teacher will invite 
his pupils forth to manly exercises that lead to 
noble manhood. It is not in the halls of legis- 
lation that we must fight the grafter and the 
corruptionist. It is in the school room that 
the rights, the liberties, the dignity of men are 
to be conserved. "Let me write the songs of 
the people I care not who makes their laws." 
Let me write noble sentiments on the heart of 
an unspoiled child and in time he will route out 
every nest of thieves in the land. And in time 
he will disturb the nightly repose of the would- 
be Caesar. 



232 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

I have said and perhaps I have shown, that 
you cannot eHminate the laggard; he is Hke the 
poor, he is always with you. You cannot 
eliminate the laggard if you would. I now as- 
sert that you should not eliminate him if you 
could. The laggard is a perpetual guarantee 
of strong teaching in the school. You cannot 
budge the laggard except by strong teaching. 
But strong teaching will do it; not by adapting 
the course of studies to his inertia : but by adapt- 
ing the teaching to him. He must be reached 
individually. Wholesale processes have wreck- 
ed themselves on him in vain. Not that whole- 
sale processes must be discontinued, for whole- 
sale processes are the very life of schools. If 
the individual is safeguarded the general crowd 
becomes a powerful educational stimulus, the 
mighty uplift of education. 

The laggard must be studied; and that is 
child-study of a most vital kind. His case must 
be diagnosed in order that it may be treated. 
His case is largely his own; and he cannot with 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 233 

safety be bunched into a class. The laggard 
must be encouraged, not depressed; he must 
be trained to acquisition; he must be caused to 
find himself, to get acquainted with himself; 
he must be led to feel that his mission is not to 
throw up the sponge, but to challenge the whole 
crowd. 

The laggard is a perpetual guarantee of great 
teaching in the schools; not merely because 
great teaching is needful to reach him, and 
through him to reach all; but because he can 
make the teaching great. The laggard is an 
educationist in the school, instructing and 
training the teachers. His lectures always 
ring true ; they never fail to edify ; and the teach- 
er who has sat at his feet and been trained by 
him becomes a pedagogical giant. 

And as the laggard is omnipresent he guards 
every point of our school system. Education 
may start off on excursions, in quest of prim- 
rose paths; but the laggard will continue to 
call back the Arnolds of Rugby, the Mark Hop- 



234 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

kinses, the Martin B. Andersons, and the James 
McCoshes, to put ingenuous youth on their 
feet and point them to the utmost heights of 
attainment. And they are all ingenuous youth. 
Their blood is not only blue, but it is purple; 
they are not merely of the nobility; they are 
princelings of the imperial household. They 
are heirs to a sovereignty greater than that of 
the Romanoffs, greater than that of the Caesars. 

The laggard in the organized school is a 
perpetual guarantee that the liberty and equal- 
ity fought for by the demigods of Marathon 
and Bunker Hill, shall not pass from men; for 
when he goes to the front they all go there ; and 
they all come into their own. 

Much has been said about the levelling pro- 
cess ; there never came a better process into this 
world, if the levelling is done in the right direc- 
tion; if the levelling is upward. 

But can this be done? It has been done for 
six hundred years in the schools that have given 
William of Wykeham and Arnold of Rugby 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 235 

their fame. Where has there ever been a more 
closely organized school system? And where 
has there ever been a severer course of studies? 
Young lads demonstrating Euclid, construing 
Livy, and interpreting Aristotle almost before 
reaching their teens. And it has been a case 
of compulsory education; for, though it has not 
had the compulsion of law, it has had the com- 
pulsion of custom and parental authority. Who 
will say that those schools never encountered a 
laggard? Yet who can can say that those 
schools ever had a left-over? The lad who 
enters Winchester, or Eton, or Westminister, i 
or Rugby, or Harrow, might as well fail in 
battle as to fail to get into and through Oxford 
and Cambridge. 

Those schools made the English democracy 
and the American democracy. That is not what 
they were started for ; they did that incidentally, 
perhaps accidentally : the remarkable case of an 
aristocracy planting democracy in the world. 
It was in those schools that Eliot and Hampden 



236 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

and Sydney dreamed their dreams of human 
rights. It was in those schools that the battles 
of Marston Moor and Naseby were won; it 
was in those schools that the British Empire 
was won. It was in schools descending from 
them and formed on their model that the Ameri- 
can Republic was created, and its constitution 
written. It was those daughter schools that 
gave to history the names of Shiloh, Gettsyburg, 
and Appomattox. 

I do not find that those schools ever under- 
took to explain anything away. They just 
* stripped to their work and won out by sheer 
good fighting. 

And what a race of idealists they have given 
to the world. Honor and fame everything; 
dollars nothing. You must strive for West- 
minister Abbey. You must attain if possible 
that "grand old name of gentleman." And 
you must carry the rules of chivalry into modern 
conditions. A lie, a deception, a craven act, 
would turn your picture to the wall. Shield 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 237 

the female and the helpless; punish him that 
molests you; but let your fight be ever fair; 
never use a ruffian's strategy nor touch a ruf- 
fian's weapon; never strike below the belt; and 
remember that when your man is down he is in 
a sanctuary as sacred as a Greek temple or a 
medieval cathedral. 

Perhaps such ideals are obsolete. There are 
those however who would shudder to concede 
it. But you cannot sweep such ideals away as 
long as the world has laggards, and so long as 
the law treats the laggard as a "man and a 
brother," by running him into your schools. 
He is the leaven that will leaven the whole lump. 

"The stone which the builders rejected has 
become the headstone of the corner." I be- 
lieve in the laggard; and I like the teacher who 
believes in the laggard. I like the teacher who 
expects to get every one of her pupils through 
their grade. And if she expects to do so, she 
will do so, unless some unforeseen circumstance 
shall arise. I like to see a town building school 



238 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

houses to accomodate its upper grades. I like 
to see a tidal wave of youth sweeping into the 
high schools and finding the traditional gulf 
nothing but an imaginary line. I like to see 
the laggard of the third grade carrying off the 
honors in algebra and Latin in the high school. 
I like to see him going to college and picking 
there the choicest cherry from the topmost twig. 

But will not these apparent miracles kill the 
teacher? Did it kill Antaeus to touch his 
mother earth ? The loveliness of character which 
the rescued laggard gives to his rescuer is equal- 
ed only by the physical vigor which her great 
service confers upon herself. I know nothing 
more sanitary than good teaching ; nothing more 
conducive to longevity. 

But how may the laggard be won? By just 
asking him a question that cannot be answered 
by yes or no; and by just keeping on asking 
questions till the 'giant arouses from his sleep 
and begins to shake his puissant locks;' — until 
his face begins to beam with intelligence; — 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 239 

until his lip begins to curl with amused scorn 
at the mole hills that he had supposed were 
mountains. 

E plurihus imiim is the motto of our republic. 
E plurihus unum is the maxim of a good school: 
one mass moving with effective momentum 
because its several units are in superb condition. 

I have treated the lagging as an involuntary- 
thing, and therefore a misfortune. That is 
what it is almost exclusively in the grades. In 
the High School however, where boys become 
fellows, there is an occasional fellow who would 
like to stretch his legs, stick his hands into his 
pockets, patronize his teacher and all creation, 
and treat school work as a bore. It would be a 
great wrong to that fellow to treat him as a 
sufferer; it would be a great wrong to that 
fellow if he could not hear the sharp note of 
discipline. When the teacher speaks with 
deprecation the school is undone. I stand for 
no coddling; I stand for no indulgence. A man 
that can have no better high school than his 



240 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

fellows choose to let him have, has mistaken 
his calling. 

But how about the mental sag that comes 
from dropping into vice? Prevention is better 
than cure; busy children are vice proof; work is 
the disinfectant of the high school. Get work 
going; and it will soon be difficult to find a 
vicious character. Bring the laggard on. That 
is the solution of the whole matter. That ends 
the clogging. 

Who can meet all these great responsibilities 
of the school? The strong teacher. And who 
can fill the schools with strong teachers? The 
laggard. Yes we need the laggard. He is the 
sheet anchor of our hopes. 



Chapter XXX 

Class- Individual Instruction* 

Class-individual instruction, better known as 
the Batavia System, had its origin in the town 
of Batavia, N. Y. The history of this origin 
is very interesting. There was an over-crowded 
room of some sixty pupils in one of the Batavia 
schools. By a fortunate suggestion on the part 
of Superintendent John Kennedy it was decided 
to relieve the congestion by putting an addi- 
tional teacher into the room instead of taking 
a class out. This teacher was Miss Lucie Hamil- 
ton and to her rare personality and superior 
teaching power is due largely the initial success 
of class-individual instruction. 

Miss Hamilton was not an assistant to the 
room teacher. Her rank was coordinate but 
her work was entirely different. It was to be 



*From Classification in the Public Schools by W. H. Holmes. 

(241) 



242 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

wholly with those pupils who for one reason or 
another were behind their class. She was to 
work with these pupils individually until they 
were able to work with the other members of the 
class. She was to work with the laggards until 
they were able to work with the leaders. From 
this individual teacher, class-individual instruc- 
tion took its rise. For the first time in the 
history of education a teacher had been assigned 
to deal with backward pupils in a humane way. 
Up to this time they had been neglected or else 
classed by themselves in rooms for backward 
pupils and with the spur that comes from an 
aggregation of dullness they were supposed to 
succeed. Now they were to be kept with their 
fellows and given the opportunity to succeed. 
And they did succeed. After a few months of 
class-individual instruction, it was evident that 
a marked change had taken place in the first 
of two-teacher rooms. Pupils who had been 
considered very dull began to improve, and 
some of them were soon up among the leaders ^ 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 243 

There was only one way to explain the really 
marvelous change. The reason lay in the work 
of the teacher, who hour after hour, and day 
after day, had called the retarded and backward 
pupils to her side to find the difficulties, and to 
encourage them to overcome these difficulties. 

There was not only a change in the working 
ability of the pupils, there was a change in their 
attitude as well. The whole atmosphere of the 
room was changed. All were happily at work. 
There were no bright pupils with nothing to do, 
and no dull pupils who could do nothing. The 
standard of work was gauged by what the ablest 
pupil could do, and all the pupils were soon well 
up to the standard. 

So the good work went on in that room, and 
then the test came. Would the plan get similar 
results in other over-crowded rooms? Addi- 
tional teachers were placed in other overcrowded 
rooms, and the results were as good as those of 
the original two- teacher room. It was thus 
shown that the success of the plan was not due 



244 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

to the personality or ability of a specially gifted 
teacher. 

The success of the plan was so great that the 
superintendent and school officials began to 
think that the two-teacher room, with the com- 
bination of class and individual instruction, was 
the only solution of the problem of the dull and 
backward child. But after the two-teacher 
plan had been in successful operation for a year, 
it dawned upon Superintendent Kennedy that 
success was due not to the two teachers but to 
the two kinds of teaching. It was the happy 
blending of individual with class instruction 
that was obtaining the results. So after think- 
ing the matter out very carefully, he announced 
to the teachers of the regular grade rooms that 
they also were to give individual instruction. 
He tells us that they looked astonished and 
asked how it was to be done. His answer was 
that half the school time was to be taken for 
individual instruction and half for class instruc- 
tion. Some of the teachers doubted; some 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 245 

protested, saying they could only get the pupils 
along by giving all the time to class work and 
to expect the work to be done by devoting one- 
half the time to the dullards was simply pre- 
posterous. 

"Well," said the superintendent, "the only 
way to tell is to try it. We have the old school 
plant intact. We have torn nothing down; and 
if the new plan proves a failure it will be an easy 
matter to go back to the old way. All I ask is 
that you give the new plan a thorough trial." 

And they did — and no teacher went back to 
the old plan, and no teacher has ever wanted to 
go back. In this way the Batavian System had 
its birth. Its success in the single-teacher 
rooms was as marked as that in the two-teacher 
rooms. It met with like success in the rooms 
where one teacher taught two grades, and it has 
met with success in schools where the teacher 
has many grades. 

Briefly, then, class-individual instruction is 
a systematic plan for helping slow and backward 



246 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

pupils to help themselves. We know that it 
has wonderful power to open the minds and 
hearts of children, both large and small, and 
cause them to unfold and grow. Col. Parker 
has said that the best result of the Quincy idea 
was a more humane treatment of little children. 
The best result of class-instruction is a more 
humane treatment of all children, large as well 
as small. We have been sacrificing millions 
of our children to the machinery of the graded 
school system. We have been trying to me- 
chanize education. Class-instruction seeks to 
humanize this mechanism. It is only sympathy 
and common sense combined. For years we 
have been writing and talking about the indi- 
vidual child but we have been doing very little 
for him. Class-individual instruction does 
something for the individual child. 

The idea of the system is really very beautiful. 
Here is an intelligent, sympathetic teacher, 
studying her flock to find the needy ones. She 
calls these needy ones to her side, one after 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 247 

another, and talks with them, and encourages 
them, points out their difficulties, and leads 
them to master these difficulties. She points 
the way, — she leads, they work and gain the 
power. The thing most needed in our schools 
is systematic, sympathetic individual help as 
an aid to class instruction. The plan we are 
considering gives this systematic, sympathetic, 
individual help. 

What has the plan done for the children of 
Batavia? 

It has given them the spirit of work and the 
power to work. The spiiit of work is every- 
were in all rooms. The pupils, all of them, at- 
tack difficulties with confidence and self-reliance. 

You know there is a saying that "he who can 
is king." The children of Batavia can, they 
have power; they can do things; they are kings 
of their work. They attack difficulties without 
shrinking or cringing; and they master things 
usually. In the case they are not able to master 
a difficulty, there is someone ready to point 



248 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

the way to mastery. The individual teacher 
is a leader rather than a helper. She has travel- 
led the road and knows the way. She says to 
the pupil, "This way, follow me." The pupil 
follows but does the climbing himself; there is 
no boosting by the teacher. 

The person who thinks that individual in- 
struction means doing the work for the pupil 
misses the point entirely. The teacher works 
with the pupil, not for him. She gives him 
sympathy in his difficulties, but she never be- 
comes so sentimental as to do his work for him. 
She encourages him by telling him that the 
difficulties he is meeting are such as all who have 
travelled the road of knowledge have met and 
mastered and they are such as he may master 
if he will put forth the effort. The successful 
teacher under the class-individual instruction 
plan is a sympathetic, patient, courageous lead- 
er and as such she develops sympathy, patience 
and courage in her pupils. 

The late Professor Hinsdale, in his excellent 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 249 

book, "The Art of Study," tells us that nowhere 
in this country is the art of study adequately 
taught. He then tells us that children must 
learn to study by studying under intelligent 
direction. The intelligent direction is the teach- 
er's work. It means directing in the right way, 
time, and place. Teaching is causing the pupils 
to learn through intelligent direction. The 
pupil must do the work, do the studying him- 
self. The pupils at Batavia know how to study 
and they study. They work and are happy. 
They have time for study and they use that for 
study. The great cry all along the line is, that 
children do not know how to study. How can 
they know if we do not give them the opportuni- 
ty to learn? Direct them intelligently, give 
them something definite to study, and then hold 
them responsible for the work assigned and you 
will find the children will develop the power 
to study. 

The fault with most teachers is that they 
help either too little or too much. In one case 



250 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

the result is discouragement; in the other it is 
loss of power. To let a pupil wrestle with 
difficulties that he cannot master, is bad; to 
help him over difficulties that he can master 
with proper direction, is perhaps worse. In- 
dividual instruction aims to teach the pupil 
how to study by giving him something definite 
to study, with proper direction in case of need. 
The children at Batavia have the power of 
independent work. There was no deception 
on the part of the pupil, no trying to tell some- 
thing that the pupil did not know was right, in 
the hope that it might happen to be right. This 
habit of bluffing is perhaps the worst trait 
possessed by school children to-day. It is the 
attempt to get credit for something that is not 
the pupil's own possession. It is the direct 
result of the present system of class teaching, 
when the teacher is a tester and not a true 
teacher; where it is a disgrace to confess ig- 
norance and to say, 'T don't know." If a pupil 
in Batavia does not know a thing, he says so 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 251 

frankly, and ivS either told to look it up, or at 
the next individual period he is taught what 
he did not know. There is no premium placed 
on superficial word repetition. There is no 
attempt to deceive the teacher; such an at- 
tempt would fail because the teacher knows her 
pupil. Her work is teaching not testing. She 
tests, of course ; but she tests that she may teach ; 
she does not teach that she may test. There 
is a great difference between the two kinds of 
work. The pupils are working for knowledge 
and power, not for a high per cent, of report 
cards. If the plan did nothing more than 
eliminate deception from class recitation it 
would be a great blessing. 

Some of the chief merits of class-individual 
instruction are its provision daily for a definite 
amount of individual instruction and its insis- 
tence that this time be given to those pupils 
who are most in need. 

It also lays stress on the fact that instruction 
is to be given at the point of greatest need rather 



•>« 



252 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

than of the daily lesson. This is one of the 
main principles of efficient individual teaching, 
yet it is one that it is hardest to get teachers to 
apply. Real individual teaching goes back, 
back until it reaches solid ground and there it 
begins to build. 

The plan also provides the supervised study- 
period. The plan has been criticised because 
it devotes too much time to the backward pupils. 
It does devote a large share of the time to the 
backward pupils because they are the most 
needy but in case the bright pupil shows that he 
needs individual instruction he receives his 
share. 



Chapter XXXI 

Opinions of Teachers 

It is interesting to read what teachers who 
have used individual instruction systematically 
in the school room for a period of several years 
say as to the relation between pupil and teacher 
brought about by its use. Here are some bits 
of testimony from teachers of Westerly, R. I., 
where individual instruction is a regular part 
of the daily work. A department teacher of the 
seventh and eighth grade writes: 

"The strongest argument that I know of in 
favor of individual work is the opportunity it 
gives the teacher to win the confidence and 
understand the personality of the pupil. Es- 
pecially is this true in departmental work, where, 
as in my case, there are upwards of one hundred 
thirty dispositions with which to deal." 

Another seventh-grade teacher writes: 

"There is closer sympathy between teacher 

(253) 



254 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

and pupils. The pupil is reached in a way that 
no other method reaches him." 

A fifth-grade teacher: 

''The teacher and pupil understand each other 
better, are drawn closer by questioning, and 
oftentimes a study once looked upon as a bug- 
bear becomes one of pleasure and much profit." 

A departmental teacher in geography and 
science : 

"I have observed a much more perfect under- 
standing of pupil by teacher and vice-versa. 
Many cases of discipline have been miost pleas- 
antly adjusted through the use of this period. 
Many unpleasant happenings have been avoided 
by a timely talk, a suggestion given, or the case 
at hand clearly put before the pupil. When 
the way is clearly pointed out many follow care- 
fully. In the case of new pupils, I have reached 
many through individual periods, have had 
them interested and reciting well in a short time, 
whereas I would not have established an ac- 
quaintance so soon had it not been for the 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 255 

individual periods. This is especially noticeable 
in the case of children who are timed, who come 
from other schools, or from environments quite 
different from that of an average pupil." 

A fourth-grade teacher : 

"There is no doubt about individual instruc- 
tion bringing pupil and teacher into closer rela- 
tions. It broadens the sympathies of the 
teacher for the pupil. By it, the real difficulties 
and problems of the child are discovered. I 
have found children failing from poor sight or 
hearing, some whose minds were distracted 
from their work by regularly frequenting the 
'cheap show,' and some who were purely lazy 
and needed to feel the pressure of compulsory 
work. I do feel that the opportunity that 
individual instruction gives me to know my 
children is very valuable. The personal con- 
tact with the teacher should and does mean 
much to the pupil." 

Third and fourth grade: 

"As a result of this work there is a pleasant 



256 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

atmosphere in the room. Pupils do not become 
discouraged. They know they will be cheer- 
fully helped. The teacher is able to know the 
pupils better, and pointing out his weak points 
to him while he is near her at the desk is more 
graciously received than if done in the presence 
of the whole class. I have never had a pupil 
who did not accept the individual help in the 
right spirit." 

Mixed room: 

"I think as a result of the individual system, 
the teacher and pupils become better acquainted 
with each other. There is a closer sympathy 
and a better understanding. The teacher sees 
more clearly the obstacles the child has to 
encounter, and the child learns to think of his 
teacher as a friend who will help him." 

First grade: 

"I think that the pupil and teacher are 
brought more closely in touch with each other 
by this system than by any other. I would 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 257 

not have missed the close relationship for a 
great deal." 

These bits of testimony are chosen at random 
from a considerable number. They represent 
fairly well the testimony of almost all the teach- 
ers who have used individual instruction for 
any length of time. 

Leigh Mitchell Hedges quoted in the Philadel- 
phia North American, from Prof. F. V. O'Shea 
of the University of Wisconsin. 

"After visiting the Batavia schools I am per- 
suaded that a work is going on there that will 
go into history as an educational renaissance, 
and that will equal the great renaissance of 
Italy in its importance to the human race. A 
system of teaching is growing up there that is 
destined to bless the world," 



Chapter XXXII 

A Minesota View* 

It was my privilege to visit the Batavia 
schools last October. I can truthfully say that 
the claims for this plan are well grounded. I 
visited every grade from the beginners through 
the high school. In every room of more than 
fifty pupils there was an individual teacher at 
her table in a convenient part of the room, busy 
at work. 

In the lower grades, and even in the high 
school, pupils were told by sign or word to go 
to the individual teacher at once. I asked the 
privilege of listening to the work done by these 
teachers. It was found that ability to develop 
power to do, rather than to get answers was the 



*From School Education. By the Associate Editor. 

(The reader is referred to an editorial headed "Fourteen 
Years After," in our September issue for a summary of what 
has been accomplished by the Batavia System in the city 
where it was born, fourteen years ago. — Editor.) 

(258) 



INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 259 

aim. The pupils did not feel that it was a 
punishment but a favor conferred upon them to 
go to the individual teacher. 

It was a pleasure to go from room to room 
and see the bright, happy faces intent on the 
work in hand, ready and anxious to do their 
best, not for show, but because the heart was 
full of joy and gladness. 

If anyone failed he was directed to the in- 
dividual teacher and the work of the class con- 
tinued as if there had been no interruption. 
No time was spent in the class to note errors, 
reasons why, nor to see to it that the pupil 
understood wherein he failed. The individual 
teacher attended to that ; the work of the recita- 
tion — the test and drill of the matter prepared 
by the pupils was first, last, and all the time. 
When a new topic was to be taken up sufficient 
time was given in the class to prepare for the 
study of the lesson by the class teacher. I was 
impressed with this fact throughout the school: 
that the recitation was the pupils and they were 



260 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

kept busy and active all the time. Principles 
first, then application and drill. I did not 
wonder at the ability and skill of the army of 
children in the Batavia schools. Their ability 
to see, know, and appreciate showed itself in 
scholarship as well as in appearance and bearing. 

One felt that character was being formed that 
would develop into true manhood and woman- 
hood, making worthy American citizens. 

I attended a part of the opening exercises of 
the high school. All were singing as we entered. 
To see 400 fine boys and girls standing proud 
and erect in their young manhood and woman- 
hood, and to feel that the soul went out in the 
glad strains which echoed through the spacious 
auditorium was enough to inspire the coldest, 
unappreciative heart. As our eyes looked out 
over this beautiful scene and noted the large 
proportion of boys — nearly half — we felt like 
exclaiming aloud in congratulations over the 
fine showing. We enjoyed the choruses of this 
band — four hundred strong — but the climax 



■ INDIVIDUAL TEACHING 261 

came when they sang their High School Song. 
They sang it with a spirit that thrilled us and 
filled onr hearts with admiration. At the close 
of this song all stood and sang two stanzas of 
The Star Spangled Banner, then saluted Old 
Glory, — a large silk flag draped across the wall 
in front. Tears filled our eyes at this touching 
scene and we felt sure that our country would 
be safe in hands trained to such loyal deeds. 

It is to be hoped that more schools will adopt 
the Batavia system and that more high schools 
will be filled with boys and girls who have 
turned their faces toward the goal that makes 
for character and citizenship. 



Below is the Batavia High School Song: 

The Blue and the White 

Written by W. L. Coryell 
(Tune: "The Orange and Black") 

Our school has always favored 

That rich and glossy blue, 
Which, with white in combination, 

Is beautiful and true. 
They are always floating gayly 

And never out of sight, 
While in unison we're singing — 

Long live the Blue and White. 

We will ever praise our High School, 

Which in Batavia stands; 
"Individual Instruction," 

Known now throughout all lands; 
And its faithful corps of teachers 

Their duty never slight. 
For they know that they are working 

For the Blue and the White. 

We recall athletic victories 

On many a day before; 
How we captured prize and trophy. 

And still we wish for more. 
But we're sure that we'll not falter 

As we renew the fight. 
Just because we're marching onward 

'Neath the Blue and the White. 



INDEX 



THE BATAVIA SYSTEM, INDEX 

Pages 

absence 38, 74, 119 

achievement 219 

acquaintance 254 

adjustability 105 

administration 94, 1 18 

adolescence 70 

advancement 18 

adults .' 180 

affection 23, 61 

after failure 182 

school assistance 45, 114, 157, 185, 193 

aggregation 72 

aims 165 

immediate 169 

initiative 177 

not knowledge 177 

power 177 

remote 169 

Albany, report to 36, 166 

alert 186 

Alexander 231 

algebra 238 

alternating 114 

alternation 118 

ambition.. 42, 100, 122, 158 

American democracy 235 

republic 236 

(265) 



266 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

anaemic children 44, 105, 137 

ancestry 141 

Anderson, Martin B 234 

annual intervals 167 

Antaeus 238 

anxiety 196 

appeal of the street 48 

application 196 

Appomattox 236 

appreciation 197 

apprehension 42, 59 

slow 48 

aptitude 112 

Archimedean lever 228 

Argentine republic 103 

Aristotle 235 

Arnold, Thomas 233, 234 

art 24 

of study 249 

as seen in Canada 213 

Ashtabula, O 123 

aspiration 161 

assembled children 34 

assembly stimulus 53 

assigned work 59 

assigning lessons 58 

atmosphere 158, 164, 215, 255 

of culture 169 

quiet 198 

attendance 26,170 

attention 42, 59, 82, 145, 174, 186 

attitude changed 243 

of parent 198 



INDEX 267 

attitude of teacher 27 

attrition 17, 19, 54 

atypical j 73 

audience needed 54 

available results 1 70 

average attendance 170 

children 20 

scholarship 124 

awkward boy 210 

squad II4 

back work 44 

only 63 

backward children 11, 42, 102, 104, 114, 115, 120, 144, 
145, 149, 174, 200, 215, 242, 245, 252 

balanced forces 54 

school 172 

Batavia Daily News q 76 

Evening Times q 131 

Sunday Times q 151 

system 32 

benefits summarized 76 

central idea 118, 216 

description 103, 140, 186, 217 

essence of 208 

experiment T^^t 

flywheel 34 

history 9, 24, 39, 98, 115, 131, 214, 241 

outside school IO9 

principal merit 64 

results in 19, 82, 85, 119, 124, 219 

Beck, J. K 126 

behavior in the street 109 

Belknap, Emmett 151, 152, 153, q 154 



268 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

Belle city of the lakes 129 

below the belt 237 

benefits summarized 76 

benignity 62 

Birmingham, England 96 

bitter thoughts 24 

bitterness 173 

blind 176 

blockheads 61 

blocking system 114 

bloom 43 

Bloomington, Ind. Evening World q 126 

Telephone q 127 

Blue and the white 262 

bluffing 250 

bodily rest 148 

born short 174 

BotticelH 57 

boy and girl 50, 82 

famine 172 

boys in high school 50, 260 

made cheap 172 

vs. girls 50 

Bradfute, Walter q 127 

Bradish, John Holley 101, 131 

P. P 131 

brains highly developed 137 

branding children 55 

brawniness 175 

breadth 17, 19 

and depth 53 

break down 77, 132, 163 

bright pupils 90, 121, 182, 213, 215, 252 



INDEX 269 

bright brightest , 15, 26 

from dull 93 

British empire 236 

Buffalo, N. Y 123 

build, not repress 81 

buildings 121, 171, 237 

Bunker Hill 234 

buoyancy 53 

bustle 196 

busy and active 260 

brains, no pranks 148 

children 158, 172 

vice-proof 240 

cadet system 1 14 

Caesar 231 

Caesars 234 

Cambridge 235 

Canada 110 

view 213 

capacity 112 

centaur 57 

central idea 118 

Chicago university 162 

chiding 158 

child study 60, 149, 232 

childhood 49 

children as a herd 68 

effect on 24 

chivalry 236 

Christianity, educational 110 

chaos 37 

character 16, 21, 260, 261 

fighting for 60 



270 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

character promoted 1 64 

richest and ripest • 62 

shaping 212 

charity 62 

charmers without competition 48 

Charlottesville, Va . 83, 125 

cheap boys 172 

shows 255 

cheerful faces 25 

cheerfulness 88, 198 

circumstances 89 

citizenship 112, 261 

class hearing 144 

instruction 17, 19, 81, 92, 132, 133, 136, 177, 215, 
218,220,244 

corrected i 223 

individual 241 

supplemented 223 

membership 177 

overhearing 209 

recitation 140 

overvalued 194 

stimulus 178, 186 

teacher 27, 39, 64 

teaching 73, 250 

uninterrupted 109, 121 

waiting 64 

work 53 

a tonic 118 

classes, large preferable 171 

classification 1, 54, 159 

climbing 107, 248 

clogging 15, 100, 229, 240 



INDEX 271 

clogs 39 

closely in touch 256 

closer relations 255 

clucking 23 

coadjutor of class teaching 38 

coddling 60, 239 

collapse 9, 41 

college 73, 168, 170, 238 

community 29 

life 54 

competition 81, 136 

composure of spirit 42^ 228 

compulsory attendance 224 

education 235 

law 230 

work 255 

conduct 88 

concentration 118 

Cone, Hobart B '. 101, 131 

confidence 42, 49, 100, 209, 219, 247, 253 

conquering difficulty 230 

conquest of ignorance 183 

conservation 135 

conserve the system 227 

contentment 62 

Council of superintendents, N. Y 96 

courage 197, 248 

conversing 211 

cordial relations 211 

corporal punishment 159 

correction 158 

of class work 17 

corruptionists 231 



272 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

Coryell, W. L. q 262 

course of study 23 

cowardice 177 

craven act 236 

creditable things 231 

criminals 56 

crisis in his career 47 

criticism 210 

cross-purposes 173 

crowd a stimulus 232 

crowds uplift or crush 163 

crowded room 147 

to the wall 49 

crushing 163 

cultivation 51 

culture 169 

curriculum 139 

damaging influence 146 

Darwinian machine 48 

deadlocks 16 

deaf 176 

deception 236 

decimation 28 

defectives 69,81, 136, 160, 173, 229 

deficient hearing 255 

definite stages 73 

delay 149 

delinquents 45 

democracy, American 235 

English 235 

demotion 159, 230 

departmental work 253 

depletion 21, 27, 28, 30, 45, 47 



INDEX 273 

deprecation 239 

depression 14 

description 103, 140, 186, 217 

despair 26 

dispelled 42 

destined to bless the world 257 

destructive fallacy 54 

determining factors 47 

detention after school 45, 114, 157, 185, 193 

development of new topic 187 

devotion to work 88 

diagnosis 174 

dictating 94 

difficulties 219 

attacked 247 

direction 249 

disappearance 48 

discouraged 92, 118, 147 

discouragement 14, 15, 37, 63, 90, 250, 256 

discover for himself 105 

discipline.. ..88,104,118, 120, 147,164,198,221,239,254 

disease centres 28 

disintegration 168 

disobedience 158 

disorder 21, 88, 158 

disposition 219 

distress 20, 42, 100 

district school 73, 225 

disturbance 93 

division of time 140 

do for himself 105 

doing in public 17 

time 56 



274 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

don'ts 11, 59, 80, 105, 134 

downtrodden 48 

dragging 20, 40, 48, 49, 53 

a teacher 20 

drawing 159, 182 

drilling 136 

dropping out 14 

drudgery 21, 161 

dual process 12 

dull boy 144 

child 149 

pupil.. 82,90,92,113,215,242 

strong 26 

dullness 142 

dunce class 230 

duty .178 

e pluribus unum 239 

eagerness 198 

earnestness 221 

echelon 25 

educate themselves 58 

education a mechanism 68 

a state of mind 231 

from the bottom 70 

educational Christianity 110 

renaissance 257 

effects 22 

on teacher 148, 238 

efficiency 91 

eighth grade 169 

elasticity 222 

elective course 169 

eliminated 28 



INDEX 275 

elimination 224 

of the laggard 232 

of the 9th grade 151 

Eliot 235 

emasculation 55 

emptying of schools 47 

emulation 17, 19, 54 

en masse I73 

and chaos 37 

encouragement 73, 92, 219, 233, 247, 248 

energy conserved 220 

English democracy 235 

government 97 

' teaching of 180 

ennobling 170 

enriched course 52 

environment 89, 106, 141 

equal endowment 141 

equality of conditions 89 

environment 89 

nature 89 

equipoise I4 

errors exhibited 146 

in porcesses I45 

esprit du corps 146 

Eton 235 

EucHd 235 

evenness in grades 38 

evil, recruits of 47 

safeguard from 164 

evolution II5 

examinations 95^ 166 

failures eliminated 221 



276 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

examinations Regents 221 

expedients 114 

expense 25, 38, 91, 120, 159, 171 

reduced 53 

explaining away 236 

exploitation 25 

eyesight 137, 174, 255 

failure 221 

of teacher to teach 143 

the rule 15 

fair fighting 237 

falling out 14 

family need 142 

Federspeil, M. A 151, 152 

feeble-minded 69, 175 

Ferry, Martha 83 

q 124 

fewer teachers 53 

fifty children, two teachers 56 

fighting for a character 60 

finances 33 

Finns 180 

firmness 82 

first grade 180 

individual teacher 78 

flabby work 50 

flagging 15 

flexibility 73 

fly-wheel of system 34 

force 173 

foreign parentage 180 

formation, not reformation 47 

frankly confidential 149 



INDEX 277 

freedom 158 

from violence 47 

fret and fury 45 

friction 121, 124 

from bottom up 68 

fundamental idea 216 

fury and fret 45 

gaps in the ranks 74 

generalization 67 

generalized education 67 

geniality 228 

genius 112 

detected 137 

in pupils 70 

gentle voice 210 

gentleman 236 

geography 254 

geometry 169 

German system 114 

getting rid of children 49 

Gettysburg 236 

ghostly abstractions 67 

giants 175 

girls vs. boys 50 

goal 176 

golden opportunity 49 

good conduct 62 

fighting 236 

governor needed 34 

graces of society 51 

grade dissection 167 

graded system 25, 27, 29, 34, 37, 39, 56, 93, 105, 112, 
115,216,219 



278 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

graded destructive tendencies 33 

evolution of 33 

harsh 44 

maintained 105 

necessity 70 

standing reproach 9 

transformed : 33 

unfinished 34 

grades intact 167 

moved 164 

graduates 128 

grafters 231 

grammar grades full 1 20 

Grant, U. S 69 

grasp principles 147 

Greek temple 237 

Greeley, Horace, q 55 

grinding out men 68 

growth at top 107 

guidance 47 

guidon 72 

H. O 179 

Hall, G. Stanley 96 

Hamilton, Lucie 78, 101, 133,215,241 

handicapped 173 

Hampden 235 

happiness 100 

happy blending 244 

children 26, 158 

faces 259 

pupils 119 

schools 43 

teachers 119 



INDEX 279 

harrow 24 

Harrow 235 

harsh system 44 

harshness 88, 189 

Hartford, Conn 114 

Haverhill, Mass 185, 200 

Hazelton, Pa 1 10 

he who can is king 247 

health 40, 100, 158 

of teacher 23, 52 

recovered 1 63 

hearing 137, 1 74, 255 

lessons 58 

heart breaking. . 24 

growth. 62 

Hedges, Leigh Mitchell, q 98, 257 

help at the time 108 

by questions 109 

in advance 182 

too little or two much 249 

helplessness 41 

heritage of capabiHty 27 

heterogeneity 141 

high aims 1 64 

high school 13, 83, 94, 95, 122, 127, 148, 156, 168, 190, 
199,214,217,238 

doubled 49, 1 20 

filled 21 

individuahzed 218 

lagging 239 

song , 261, 262 

the test 70 

high standing 127 



280 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

higher education 128, 168, 170 

Hinsdale, Prof, q 248 

history of system 9, 24, 39, 98, 115, 131, 214, 241 

Holmes. Stanley H. q 185 

W. H. q 241 

home study 40, 44, 106, 119, 127, 156, 198 

eliminated 195 

homes, effect on 43 

hoodlums 48, 172 

hope 42 

Hopkins, Mark 233 

hospital system 115 

Houston, J. A. q 213 

how to do it 80 

to study 118 

humane treatment 246 

humanize 170 

humiliating 182 

hydra-headed 230 

hygienists 28 

hysteria 22, 78 

inattention 88 

ideals and stakes 228 

idealists 231 

ideals obsolete 237 

idiocy 69,70 

ignorance confessed 250 

Illinois 110 

imprisonment 45 

in every grade 199 

incapability 27 

incorrect sentences 146 

incorrigibles 41, 56, 57, 175, 176, 230 



INDEX 281 

independence 28, 96, 122, 219, 221 

developed 58 

independent study 135 

work 250 

Indiana view 126 

individual attention 15 

first, then mass 66 

needs of 10 

indolence 63 

indulgence 239 

industrial demand 142 

education 169 

inefficiency 135 

inequality of constitution 163 

inertia 232 

inertness 174 

inflexibility 105 

ingenuous youth 234 

initiative 58, 60, 177 

of pupils 219 

of the teacher 63 

injurious tendencies 29 

injustice 48 

innovation 31 

insolvent 178 

inspiration 115, 163 

intellectual deficiency 160 

inteelligence 88 

intensive study 195 

interest 14, 21, 26, 41, 50, 53, 145, 147, 221 

moral safeguard 49 

inventions 35 

invidious comparisons 88 



282 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

irregular attendance 14 

Ishpcming, Mich 180 

janitors 171 

Japan 103 

Jesus Christ q 150 

joy in work 42 

of achievement .- 219 

just teachers 50 

justice 56, 177 

juvenile delinquents 56 

Kennedy, John 76, 78, 87, 96, 98, 99, 101, 110, 124, 131, 
135,181, 184,213,216,241 

portrait, jrontispiece 

q ....107 

report to Albany 36 

key-note for next decade 96 

kindly feeling 57 

kings of their work .' 247 

knowledge 177 

and power 251 

of pupil 82 

abor and wait .* 175 

lessened 124 

making 172 

more effective 211 

saving 172 

Lacy, Winifred q 180 

Ladd, E. A 213 

q 139 

ladder to success 216 

Lady Wisdom 57 

laggard 15, 31, 64, 72, 82, 85, 90, 100, 136, 150, 174, 181, 
239,242 



INDEX 283 

an educationist 233 

commands the situation 229 

getting rid of 229 

makes teaching great 233, 240 

what to do with him 224 

lagging •. . .215 

Lakewood, N. Y. address 19 

language 182 

larger classes 171 

Latin ! 238 

laziness 63, 177, 255 

lead the mind 59 

leader, not helper 248 

leaven the lump 237 

less work 120 

lesson line 63 

levelled up I49, 234 

levelling process 234 

upward I49, 234 

liberal culture 170 

lies 236 

limp boys 51 

lines of least resistance 68, 142 

Livy 235 

Lockport, N. Y 151 

Union-Sun q 151 

lock-up 176 

long legs 210 

longevity 52 

loud voice 189 

love and sympathy 150 

for the child 61 

loving attention 68 



284 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

low voice 189 

McCosh, James 234 

McKenzie, John M 101, 131 

machines 25, 30, 66, 140, 222 

malnutrition 137 

manly exercises 231 

map of progress 73 

Marathon 234 

Mark, Thiselton 96 

marking exercises 158 

Marston Moor 236 

martyrs 23 

mass 89 

methods 141 

not herd 54 

tangled 163 

teaching 39 

massing of children 54 

mastery 93 

self-gained : 189 

maximum 166 

mechanism 68 

mechanized education 246 

mechanizing 81 

medical service 20 

medieval cathedral 237 

memory 82 

mental condition 157 

damnation 113 

injury 28, 30 

pressure 145 

sag 240 

troubles 173 



INDEX 285 

merciful 51 

miasma 77 

Michigan .' 123 

mind, fighting for 60 

ministration 31, 94 

Minnesota view 258 

mixed room 256 

momentum of numbers 54 

Montreal, Canada 123 

moral danger 44, 48 

effect 16, 196, 212 

health 16 

injuries 28, 30 

stamina 48 

more time 121 

mothers 62 

overworked 40 

motives of children 216 

movement of grade 38 

music 159, 182 

mutual understanding 254 

nagging 23 

Naseby 236 

National superintendents 96 

nature 89 

needs, rights, duties 278 

needy pupils 251 

nerve wrecked 51 

nerves 163 

nervous breakdown 133 

debility 41, 163 

depletion 45 

dread 105 



286 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

nervous system 137 

timidity 174 

wrench 102 

nervousness 41 

neurasthenia 41, 64, 105 

never in lessons to come 63 

new education 42 

maxims 43 

pupils 254 

topics 187,259 

New England Journal of Ed'n q 180 

New York city 110, 123 

Newton, Isaac 69, 137 

ninth grade 153 

eHminated 151 

no backward step. . . . .• 33 

class time lost 259 

extra cost 17 

extra labor 17 

telling 11 

uniformity 220 

Noah's ark 172 

noble manhood 231 

sentiments 231 

non-organization. .- 225 

normal children 90, 105, 176, 216 

conditions 45 

method 136 

North American. Phila., q 98 

not a coach 134 

alike 217 

before class 256 

equal . . . . ' 217 



INDEX 287 

not punishment 259 

numbers, effect of 19 

momentum of 54 

O'Shea, M. V 257 

q 98 

obstacles 256 

obstructed school 14 

obstruction 66 

occupation interested 164 

Ogdensburg, N. Y ■ 87, 123 

Ohio 110 

Old Glory 262 

one link lost 147 

Ontario, Canada 213 

opening exercises 260 

the heart 61 

opinions of teachers 253 

oral expression 188 

order 62,164,198 

organization 30, 37, 168, 224, 226, 235 

a necessity 33 

a snare 227 

downward 73 

humanized 66 

out of the mouths of babes 60 

overcrowded rooms 9,31, 32, 80, 98, HI, 131, 200, 214, 241 

overflow room 37 

overstrain 14, 41, 45, 77, 90, 156 

over-work 45, 79, 156 

Oxford 235 

Palmer, E. D HI 

parental wisdom 51 

parents 30, 43, 45 



288 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

parents attitude 198 

joy of 38 

suffering 40 

tortured 77 

Parker, Col F. W. 246 

passivity 174 

pathetic silence 24 

patience 82, 248 

patronizing the teacher 239 

Pease, Robert B 101, 131 

pedagogic principles 219 

pedagogical giant 233 

per capita cost 171 

perception 59 

periods for study 219 

persecution 64 

personal contact 255 

equation 222 

relations 149 

service 94 

personality 82, 215, 253 

studied 220 

Peterborough, Canada 123 

Philadelphia, Pa 85 

view 98 

physical 105 

comfort 210 

defects 136 

disability 160 

effect 148 

exercise 58 

health 16 

injuries 28 



• INDEX 289 

physical troubles 173 

vigor: 238 

wreck 102 

physician 43 

pinched 225 

plagues ' 41 

Piatt, Charles E. q 131 

point of greatest need 251 

poor sight 137, 174, 255 

popular 31 

popularity. ■ 162 

pouring children 139 

power 177 

to do 258 

to work 247 

with affection 23 

precociousness 138 

prejudice 184 

preoccupation 164 

preparation section 12 

preparatory school 73 

present view 139 

pressure 77, 90 

pride 158 

prime method 136 

pillar 19 

Principals conference, N. Y 224 

privacy 216 

Procrustean bed 67, 74 

prodigy called 63 

promotion 90, 95, 102, 119, 122, 142, 149, 164, 183, 193, 
237 
anxiety 197 



290 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

promotion not by favor 166 

reports '. ... 173 

semi-annual 154 

yearly 159 

Providence, R.I 115 

pupil who fails 187 

pupil-teacher 114 

put on his feet 177 

pygmy 175 

quantitative feature 43 

formula 179 

quasi penal 56 

questioning 143, 254 

questions 109, 177, 238 

quick pupils 122, 164, 227 

sections 55 

quiet 189 

study 218 

Quincy idea 246 

race-horses 71 

Racine, Wis 123 

News q 129 

Rawles, Wm. A 126, 127 

reaching the individual 55 

recitations 186, 192 

do not drag 104 

fewer 157 

section 12 

tragic struggles 16 

uninterrupted , 144, 157, 188, 195, 259 

recruits of evil .- 48 

red marks 128 

Reed, Miss. q. 200 



INDEX 291 

refinement 24 

refining ; . . 1 70 

reformation 47, 62 

Regents of the University of N. Y 96 

examinations 95, 166, 221 

registration 170 

regulating 94 

rejected 140 

relation of two teachers 118 

relationship 257 

remedial 1 " 

remedies 22 

remote aims 165, 169 

reduced expense 17 

renaissance 257 

repose 14,49 

reproaches o° 

reproof 88 

rescued laggard 238 

resentment 27, 66 

restoration 16 

restorative effects 17 

results in Batavia 19, 82, 85, 124, 219 

outside school 109 

summarized 119 

resuscitation 47 

retains pupils 47, 49, 220 

retardation 48, 165, 183, 227, 243 

retroactive influences 149 

retrogression '4 

revealed weakness 63 

revelation and revolution 37, 75, 101, 131 

revolutionize 97 



292 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

richer chrysalis 69 

ridicvde 209 

right-angle to line 165 

Romanoffs 234 

rooms larger 121 

rowdyishness 109 

royal roads 172 

Rugby school 233, 234, 235 

rugs. 67 

run in 56, 176 

safe-guard against evil 164 

safe-guarded 44 

safety 43 

sagging 172, 224, 227, 228, 230 

salubrious teaching 21, 163 

salutary conditions 45 

sanctuary 237 

sane teachers 50 

sanitary conditions 46, 238 

sanitation 163 

saps energy 183 

sarcasm 88 

Satan 25 

satisfactory 186 

save the rejected 140 

scholarship 88, 260 

School Education, q 258 

school hours only •. 44 

plant 42, 245 

records 155, 166 

register 170 

work a bore 239 

science 254 



INDEX 293 

scientific management 135 

scolding 120 

scorching 210 

Scott, Walter 69 

Scribner, E. E 181 

seating 174 

seclusion , 143 

second teacher 29, 32, 37, 90, 104, 107, 108, 116, 132, 159, 
181, 185, 188, 241 

work 31 

see that it is done 80 

that the child knows 59 

segregation 56, 72, 175 

self-activity the goal 59 

-appropriation 42 

-confidence 58 

-elimination 17 

-help 189 

-reliance 58, 88, 219, 221, 247 

-respect 211 

semi-annual promotion 154, 168 

sensible ^ ... 186 

sentimentality 248 

sequence of efforts 28 

sequent steps 60 

service 94 

severity 88 

sharp words 120 

shawls 67 

Shiloh ; 236 

side-draught 64 

-lights 17,19,54 

simple 186 



294 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

singing 260 

single teacher 32, 55, 91, 104, 116, 119, 159, 185, 190, 
209, 215, 244 

Sisyphus, taste of 226 

skipping grades 159, 165 

slant and echelon 25 

slanting line 26 

sleep 43 

slow-minded children 14, 27, 38, 48, 69, 92, 112, 122, 134, 
136,192,200,215,227,245 

become bright 184 

our teachers 60 

sections 55 

to the front 107 

small groups 55 

snaring children 225, 227 

sobs 24 

stifled 40 

social life of teachers 23, 51 

sociology 24 

soul uplift 115 

sounder, scholarship 18 

sparkle 44 

special schools 30 

teachers 159 

spelling 182 

spirit of work 215, 247 

spiritual repose 49 

spontaneous spirit 158 

spur of competition 136 

spurred on • 132 

square boy in round hole 105 

stagnation 64 



INDEX 295 

stakes and ideal 228 

stalwart pupils 60 

standard of work 243 

raised 200 

Star spangled banner 262 

state department 96, 167 

Stein, Anna K. q 85 

still strong men 231 

stimulus of crowd 232 

of numbers 17, 220 

stone rejected 237 

strain 15 

on teacher 149, 173, 183, 196 

straying 150 

street appeals 48 

strength to grapple 145 

strengthening graded system 162 

strong grade 176 

pupils 60,197 

teaching 232 

strongest characters 26 

studious application 196 

study periods 222, 252 

stumbling 143 

stupid 90 

subnormal pupils 173 

success 158 

Suffer little children 150 

suffering of parents 40 

of public 41 

of pupils 20,39, 113,227 

of teachers 40 

sunshine , , 43, 77 



296 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

superintendent emancipated 65 

supplement to class 17 

survival of fittest 48 

sustained diligence 172 

sweep of the class 176 

Sydney 236 

symmetry 168 

sympathetic guidance 47, 50, 195 

sympathies 62 

sympathy 42, 56, 61, 150, 189, 196, 248, 253 

and common sense 246 

systematic help 247 

talent universal 70 

tangle of facts ; . . . 147 

tangled mass 163 

tardiness of response 69 

taxpayers 38 

Taylor, Frederick W 135 

teachers, effect on 23, 160, 238 

favor it 191, 253 

suffer 40 

teaching a fine art 68 

not testing 251 

tears wiped away 42 

temperance 106 

tension 164 

tester, not teacher 250 

testing exercise 187 

tethered • ... 20 

theoretic merits 219 

thicker bred 69 

thinking in public 17 

threats 88 



INDEX 297 

,- , ,., 80,134 

three don ts 

elements 

time wasted '^'^^^ 

,. .,., 63,174 

timidity • 

Titusville, Pa ^^'j 

■4-i^l p-po -ri Qfi 

Tomlinson, Daniel W 75, 101, 131, 132 

183 

tonic 

64 
torture to laggard .n^ ' ooq 

tragedy. ^^ 

train attention 

trained • ' ' ' 

training ^9 

transformation 

triumphs of the teacher 

truant othcer 

56 

truants 

'"'°f ■„ :::;i86 

two teachers 

1 „ 104 

work as one 

unfortunates iV ^.^ 

1 J -.„ . 56, 167 

ungraded room ^^^' ^^^ 

school ' , _ 

45 
unhappy children 

uniform work 

34 
universal education \ 

. . .83, 168 

universities 

University of Pa ' 83 125 

of Virginia ' ^^^ 

^^^^^"^""^.^ 61222 

unresponsiveness .,n 00 

30, 00 

unrest _ 

untaught must go 



298 THE BATAVIA SYSTEM 

uplift 150, 163 

upper grades. 156, 168, 238 

upraised hands 25 

vacuities filled 49 

varied stimulus 54 

vehicle relieved 29 

vice, dropping into 240 

vigor 45, 1 77 

vigorous teachers 163 

virile 170 

vocation a joy 150 

Washburn, J. J. . .- 101, 131 

waste of energy 65 

reduced to minimum 229 

weak pupils 60, 195 

made strong 31 

spots strengthened 92 

West Bay City, Mich Ill, 122 

Westerly, R. I. address 39 

opinions 253 

Westminister abbey 236 

school 235 

when man is down 237 

Whitney, Barney q 87 

wholesale education 54 

failure 14 

processes 232 

teaching 9 

wild boy 57 

will strengthened 16 

to do right 16 

William of Wykeham 234 

Winchester 235 



INDEX 299 

with, not for the pupil 248 

withdrawn from school 50, 148, 154 

Wisconsin 110, 129 

wolf from the door 50 

word repetition 251 

work •. 17v3 

a disenfectant 240 

by himself 218 

dangerous 45 

workshop 30 

worry 41, 45, 90, 100, 156, 163, 173 

kills more than work 120 

worrying parents 40 

writing 182 

written work. 94 

zealous enterprise 25 



LIBRARY 



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